CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

DARK PARADISE:

RAPTURE AND TYPOS IN DANTE AND BECKETT

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Master of Art in Theatre

By

Robert Lynn Newton

December 2012

The thesis of Robert Lynn Newton is approved:

______Dr. Ron Popenhagen Date

______Dr. Dorothy G. Clark Date

______Dr. Ah-Jeong Kim, Chair Date

California State University, Northridge

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For Janet Pearson

What thoughts, who knows. Thoughts, no, not thoughts. Profounds of mind. Buried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach. Samuel Beckett

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Signature Page ii

Dedication iii

Abstract v

Introduction 1 Chapter One 5 Belacqua Real and Imagined

Chapter Two 23 Rapture: The Balcony of the Soul

Chapter Three 39

Typos: The Footprint of the Creator

Chapter Four 56 Rapture II: The Treacherous Moon

Chapter Five 70 Dark Paradise

Works Cited 82

Works Consulted 85

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ABSTRACT

DARK PARADISE:

RAPTURE AND TYPOS IN DANTE AND BECKETT

By

Robert Lynn Newton Master of Arts in Theatre

The intertextuality of Dante and Beckett is examined through the use of dramatic contrasts of light and dark. Rapture represents sentient light, derived from

Dante’s study of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Avicenna. Its opposite Typos is a material form that cancels the light, casts a shadow, or leaves a signature of the creator on the face of creation. Characters in Beckett’s Happy Days, and the stories “Ding-Dong” and “Dante and the Lobster” present manifestations of Dante’s Beatrice figure centered in the attributes of facial expressions as a sign of Rapture. The Typos found in Dante’s poetic imagery is traced in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Molloy, Footfalls, and Rough for

Radio II. In the works of Beckett’s late period, Not I, and Ill Seen Ill Said, he offers us an inversion of Dante’s symbolism, in which darkness is no longer infernal but divine.

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The brilliant light of God’s presence that pervades Dante’s Paradiso is so overpowering to modern eyes that Beckett can only do it justice by representing it with its opposite: the Dark Paradise in which the darkness is no longer a threat but a sacred space.

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INTRODUCTION

Samuel Beckett’s allusions to Dante have been of scholarly concern for several decades now. The early studies focused mainly on reference-hunting after the prominence of Waiting for Godot stimulated a renewed interest in Beckett’s early fiction. There was a tendency to assign Beckett’s texts as examples of a purgatorial or infernal vision, and “describe Beckett’s anti-theological use of Dante as parodic and subversive” (Caselli 2). But the process has become more refined in recent years, as exemplified by critics such as Hugh Haughton and Daniela Caselli. The latter in particular writes of how her predecessors in the Dante/Beckett field “oversimplify and ultimately stabilize Dante as an authoritative predetermined meaning, reading him for instance, as ‘symboliz[ing] the cultural heritage of Western civilization’ or as a ‘devout

Christian’ whose values and theology are subverted by Beckett” (Caselli 1). Haughton sees in Beckett a Dante who represents not the accumulation of a cultural tradition but a dispersal, a mis-remembering (Haughton 142).

It turns out that there is a plurality of Dantes in Beckett meaning different things at different phases of Beckett’s career. Beckett’s versions of Dante are personal and idiosyncratic constructions, reflecting as much on Beckett’s character as they do on the historical Dante.

Intertextual studies are exactly what they say they are: studies of texts, but in terms which do not always transfer to the three-dimensional world of theatre. Beckett’s use of Dante in his plays, and in his later plays especially, hinges on his absorption of

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Dante’s metaphysics and the meanings that attach to vivid contrasts of light and dark.

The starting point of this investigation begins, in a sense, with the Biblical creation of the world itself, which has its beginning with the separation of darkness and light.

Dante’s use of these contrasts is cosmic in scope, dealing as he does with the pitch dark of Hell and the brilliance of Heaven. Beckett’s universe is more intimately scaled, and crafted for a minimalist stage. And in his final years, Beckett offers us an inversion of

Dante’s symbolism, in which darkness is no longer infernal but divine. The brilliant light of God’s presence that pervades the final cantos of Dante’s Paradiso is so overpowering to modern eyes that Beckett can only do it justice by representing it with its opposite: the Dark Paradise in which the void is no longer a threat but a sacred space.

In works such as Not I and Ill Seen Ill Said, the paradisal vision, although suffused in darkness, might not present us with an afterlife as sharply defined as that in Dante’s

Paradise, but it is still a revelation, a destination, and a “consummation devoutly to be wished.”

The two major tropes Dante and Beckett utilize will be known here as Rapture and Typos, rough equivalents of light and dark, or sun and shadow. They are not simply properties, but actual powers. Rapture is not only brilliant light, but inspired light, created by a spark of the Divine. It can blind a person, or dazzle the mind, or change one’s life in mid-stream. Typos (which is italicized because this Greek root for ‘type’ and many other related words has no English equivalent that conveys its full meaning in this thesis), is the opposing force, a material form that cancels the light, or intrudes upon it, or casts a shadow, or leaves a signature. Rapture is always ethereal, but Typos can either strike from above or below, and many of its expressions are man-made. The act

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of writing itself is a result of Typos, because it is comprised of one solid substance impacting on another.

This thesis will include both prose and plays by Beckett because, in the final analysis they form a continuum. Genre distinctions eventually wear down in the course of his career, and many of his later works in prose, such as The Lost Ones, Company, and Worstward Ho, have been adapted for the stage, usually with Beckett’s approval and consultation. Chapter One, concerning as it does mostly prose and poetry, is primarily textual in analysis. Belacqua, a minor figure who appears briefly in Dante’s

Purgatorio, is so central to Beckett’s canon that he needs to be confronted head-on, in the beginning. The critical method applied here derives from the semiotic theories of

Julia Kristeva, and in particular her essay, “Word, Dialogue and Novel.” Here Kristeva cites the influence of the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bahktin, who was:

[ . . . ] one of the first to replace the static hewing out of texts with a

model where literary structure does not simply exist but is generated in

relation to another structure. What allows a dynamic dimension to

structuralism is his conception of the ‘literary word’ as an intersection of

textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue

among several writings [ . . . ]. (Kristeva 35-36)

Belacqua is shaped by an “intersection of textual surfaces” that overlap one another, some of them with Beckett’s words, some with Dante’s, and some with other sources.

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Chapter Two explores Rapture as a philosophy of light derived from Dante’s study of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Avicenna, and how this philosophy translates into the divine love that lights Beckett’s Happy Days.

Chapter Three examines the importance of Typos and again utilizes semiotic analysis to define the “foot print” of the creator present in Dante and Beckett, with attention to Dante’s poetic imagery, and Beckett’s How It Is and Rough for Radio II.

Chapter Four revisits Rapture in a variant form, that of lunar instead of solar light, in which a different range of properties and powers come into play, with less happy results. This examination will deal with Canto 2 of Paradiso, and Beckett’s play,

Footfalls, and his short story, “Dante and the Lobster.”

Chapter Five concerns Dante’s Paradiso alongside Beckett’s Not I and Ill Seen

Ill Said, as both writers strive to articulate the inexpressible and illuminate the invisible, each pursuing a subject matter that calls into question subject and matter.

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CHAPTER ONE:

BELACQUA REAL AND IMAGINED

The formulation of Becket’s personal Dante begins with Beckett’s re- appropriation of a minor character from Purgatorio into an alter-ego for himself, a fictionalization embracing his least-admired traits, who then becomes the anti-hero is his early fiction.

The unpublished notes from Beckett’s reading of Purgatorio make it possible for us to read its opening cantos through his own eyes, as it were. He is struck particularly by

the sensuality of the verse. In Mary Bryden’s words:

From Canto 1, line 117, Beckett jots down the phrase “il tremolar della

marina” (the rippling of the sea), and underlines it. This vision of the sea

at dawn, glimpsed by the Pilgrim under a sky suffused with “the tender

tint of orient sapphire” (line 13), constitutes one of those sensuous

descriptions of the landscape that serve to distinguish the opening

Purgatory experience from the preceding transit through the terrain of

Inferno. (Bryden 30)

The contrast between Hell and Purgatory are certainly remarkable. The final cantos of

Inferno are horrifying and phantasmagorical, climaxing with the discovery of Satan, a gigantic three-faced monster, frozen in ice in the lowest point of Hell, and perpetually gnawing on the bodies of Judas, Cassius, and Brutus. Dante holds on to Virgil as Virgil climbs down the monster’s icy, shaggy body, straight through the center of the earth, to

5 arrive eventually, in a kind of antechamber, or cave, which leads to a round opening, or pertugia, and thus to an opening on the opposite side of the earth: the shoreline of the island Purgatory.

There, night is waning, but the stars – stars Dante has never seen before from his own hemisphere – are blazing. Near the water’s edge, where the grass is damp with the morning dew, Dante writes:

[. . . ] my master gently placed both of his hands –

outspread - upon the grass; aware

of what his gesture and intention were,

I reached and offered him my tear-stained cheeks

and on my cheeks, he totally revealed

the color that Inferno had concealed. (1, 124-29)

This tender scene with its symbolic cleansing, sets the tone for what follows in this region known as Ante-Purgatory, the realm of excommunicates, late repentants, and the indolent. Purgatory proper occupies the higher terraces of the mountain, set aside for souls who escaped damnation but still must be purged of the more serious, or Deadly, sins. But Ante-Purgatory is almost resort-like with its vistas and refreshing breezes, and

Dante watches as a boat arrives with fresh souls, singing in unison and deboarding with wondrous bewilderment. They “seemed not to know the place; they looked about / like those whose eyes try out new things to them” (2, 53-54). Dante’s presence creates a distraction for them, as they notice that he, unlike they, still breathes and casts a shadow.

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A crowd gathers “as people crowd around a messenger / who bears an olive branch, / to hear his news” (2, 70-71). One steps forward to embrace him, “his affection so great that

I was moved to mime his welcome,” but there is nothing for Dante to grasp. The soul smiles at him and draws back, and Dante now recognizes him as his friend, the singer

Casella. Bryden, again, following Beckett’s note-card, writes: “Under the phrase from

Canto 2, line 83, ‘lombra sorrise’ (the shadow smiled), Beckett writes, ‘1st shade to smile

[. . . ] and to sing at D’s request” (Bryden 31). Dante quotes the first line of Casella’s song, “Love that discourses to me in my mind,” and Beckett notes that it is Dante’s own composition, which Casella is believed to have set to music. Having now reached Canto

3, Beckett takes note of another shade who smiles at Dante: “2nd shade to smile, 1st

Casella” (Bryden 32).

There is a discernible pattern in Beckett’s note-taking: an emphasis on the visual, on the rippling of the sea, the tender tint of orient sapphire in the lightening sky, and the smiles. Beckett has already encountered some memorable images in Inferno that will turn up later in his work, but they involve suffering; smiles are scarce in Hell. In Canto 4,

Beckett notes a third smile, far more significant than the others, because it is Dante himself smiling: “Dante smiles (at Belacqua). D’s first smile?” (Bryden 32).

It is in fact the first instance in the Commedia of Dante smiling, and the soul who inspires it is another deceased friend, one Duccio di Bonavia, nicknamed Belacqua.

Dante has been climbing up a steep, rocky incline, falling behind Virgil and then, breathless, coming to rest on the next level of their journey: the terrace of souls who delayed repentance until the moment prior to death. Virgil tells him that the first levels of the Mount are steep, the higher one goes, the more gentle the slope:

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Therefore, when this slope seems to you so gentle

that climbing farther up will be as restfull

as traveling downstream by boat, you will

be where this pathway ends, and there you can

expect to put your weariness to rest. (4, 91-95)

A voice nearby intrudes, and remarks, “Perhaps you will have need to sit before you reach that point!” Dante and Virgil follow the sound to a group of souls lounging in the shade of a boulder.

And one of them, who seemed to me exhausted,

was sitting with his arms around his knees;

between his knees, he kept his head bent down.

“O my sweet lord,” I said, “look carefully

at one who shows himself more languid than

he would have been were laziness his sister!”

Then that shade turned towards us attentively,

lifting his eyes, but just above his thigh,

and said: “Climb, then, if you’re so vigorous!”

Then I knew who he was, and the distress

that still was quickening my breath somewhat

did not prevent my going to him [. . . ].

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The slowness of his movements, his brief words

had stirred my lips a little toward a smile [. . . ]. (4, 109-22)

Dante recognizes him, expresses relief that Belacqua is not in Hell, and asks why he lingers here and does not climb. Belacqua replies, “O brother, what’s the use of climbing?” He is fated to remain the same number of years in Ante-Purgatory that he spent in life delaying repentance. Only the prayers of others can shorten his term:

“ [. . . ] unless, before then, I am helped by prayer

that rises from a heart that lives in grace;

what use are other prayers – ignored by Heaven?” (4, 133-35)

In other words, since he cannot rely on, or hope for the prayers of others, he might as well stay where he is while he serves out his term. Hence, “andar in su che porta?”

What’s the use of climbing? (4, 127) So ends the brief encounter. Virgil, who is eager to move along, bids Dante to follow him. Belacqua is never seen again, nor mentioned.

The impact this episode has on Beckett is belied by its brevity and seeming inconsequence. There is no question that Beckett has found some version of himself in this cul-de-sac of Purgatorio. It is as if he has kicked into some cranny of Dante’s mind and found a room with a mirror. As a young man, turning his back on a teaching career, he struggles with the task of writing allusive, erudite, intractable, and largely unpublishable fiction. The boulder in whose shadow he languishes is James Joyce, a mentor and crucial influence on his writing. He suffers from spiritual anomie, unsure of

9 how to move forward in life. As Belacqua waits, so do Beckett’s most famous characters,

Vladimir and Estragon, whose entire existence consists of waiting for the Godot who never arrives.

Beckett is sufficiently intrigued by Belacqua to delve into the commentaries and learn more about him. The standard reference work available to him is Toynbee’s

Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante, which yields essentially all there is to know. Two fifteenth century writers had addressed the issue, and what little is known or supposed of Belacqua is scant, yet colorful. Toynbee writes:

Benvenuto says of him that besides being a maker of musical instruments,

B. was something of a musician also, and adds that D., who was a lover of

music, was intimate with him and on that account: “[. . . ] He was from

Florence and built guitars and other musical instruments he then carved

and engraved with much care the heads and necks of these guitars, and

sometimes he played some of them. For this reason Dante know him well,

since he was delighted by music [ . . .]” The Anonimo Fiorentino says of

him: “This Belacqua was a citizen from Florence, an artisan who made

such remarkable guitar’s necks, and was the laziest man who ever existed;

and it is said of him that he used to come to the shop in the morning and

sit down, and he would never rise but when he wanted to go to eat and

sleep. Now, the Author was very intimate with him: he used to reproach

him much for his negligence; so that one day, while he was reproaching

him, Belacqua replied with Aristotle’s words: Sedendo et quiescendo

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anima efficitur sapiens [ . . .]; to which the Author replied: certainly, if to

be seated is to be wise, then no man is wiser than thee [ . . . ].

(Caselli 38-39)

Granted, these anecdotes have no more historical merit than the tales told of a young

Shakespeare who was a deer-poacher, or a cow-butcher. What is notable is that the fifteenth century commentators on Dante have presumed to unearth just enough information to verify Dante’s portrayal in Purgatorio: Belacqua’s laziness, and the good- natured yet sarcastic tone of the banter that passed between the two of them. The historical fiction floats effortlessly over Dante’s poetic fiction, affirming everything

Dante has said about Belacqua and hinting of more, such as Belacqua’s penchant for quoting Aristotle.

These fragments find their way into the notebook Beckett is keeping, circa 1930, as he develops his first attempt at extended fiction, the novel which will become Dream of Fair to middling Women. Here, over Dante’s poetic fiction, and the commentators’ historical fiction, he will superimpose a third layer of autobiographical fiction. Beckett’s fictional alter-ego is an Irish student named Belacqua Shuah, fluent in a number of languages, and prone, like Dante’s Belacqua, to lethargy. Midway in the third person narrative, Beckett steps outside the story and foregrounds his own thoughts to create a meta-narrative, elaborating on his character’s tendency to lose himself in a dreamlike inertia that draws direct comparison to the desired state of Dante’s Belacqua:

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There is no real Belacqua, it is to be hoped not indeed, there is no such

person. All that can be said for certain is, that as far as he can judge for

himself, the emancipation, in a slough of indifference and negligence and

disinterest, from identity, his own and his neighbour’s, suits his accursed

complexion much better than the dreary fiasco of oscillation that presents

itself as the only alternative. He is sorry it does not happen more often,

that he does not go under more often. [ . . .] Whether squatting in the heart

of his store, sculpting with great care and chiseling the heads and necks of

lutes and zithers, or sustaining in the doorway the girds of eminent poets,

or coming out into the street for a bit of song and dance [ . . .] he was

cheating and denying his native indolence, denying himself to the ground-

swell of his indolence, holding himself clear, refusing to be sucked down

and abolished. [ . . .] Sometimes he speaks of himself thus drowned and

darkened as “restored to his heart”; and at other times as “sedendo et

quiescendo” with the stress on the et and no extension of the thought into

the spirit made wise. Squatting in the heart of the store he was not quiet.

Cellineggiava finickety scrolls and bosses, exposed to the fleer of uneasy

poets. If to be seated is to be wise, then no man is wiser than thee. That

class of cheap stinger. (Dream 121-22)

It might help to imagine an anatomy textbook, with its overlapping transparencies. Upon an illustration of the skeletal system, one turns back a page and superimposes the respiratory system. Then turns back one more page and superimposes the circulatory

12 system over both, and then the muscular system. By now the skeletal system might be wholly obscured, but its existence has been established. Dante’s lines in Purgatorio establish the character of Belacqua; the commentators establish his trade, that of a luthier, and situate him in a shop. And since the witty exchanges between Dante and Belacqua must have taken place somewhere, Beckett almost, but not quite, establishes a scene that could have included both of them, but stops just short of naming an individual poet.

These three levels, or transparencies, share one precise point of contact, the pronoun

“he”; he alone can be either Belacqua Shuah or Dante’s Belacqua. Beckett does not want us to know if one stops and the other takes over. In Caselli’s words:

This proliferation of sources mirrors and intertextually enhances the

instability asserted in the statement ‘there is no real Belacqua . . . there is

no such person.’ The third person singular pronoun ‘he’ is a fragile device

unable to mask the composite character of the protagonist, whose

‘personality’ multiplies as in a mirror game. (Caselli 44-45)

“Belacqua” the sign now signifies either Irish Belacqua or Florentine Belacqua.

Beckett as creator blurs the distinction because, according to him, there is no real

Belacqua. And the luthier’s shop frequented by poets is a creation that gives rise to another transparency: an imaginary or remembered Florence which floats above

Beckett’s actual Dublin. While potential publishers are reading and rejecting Dream of

Fair to middling Women in 1933, Beckett is already recasting its material into a sequence of short stories which becomes More Pricks Than Kicks. He has preserved Belacqua

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Shuah and a few of Dream’s other characters, but he has eliminated Belacqua’s adventures on the Continent and situated the action solely in Dublin. In one of these stories, “A Wet Night,” Belacqua walks the streets of Dublin while imagining himself back in Florence, a mental process Beckett equates with a musical composition:

Long straight Pearse Street, it permitted of a simple cantilena in his mind,

its footway peopled with the tranquil and detached in fatigue, its highway

dehumanized in a tumult of buses. [ . . .] Then to pass by the Queens,

home of tragedy, was charming at that hour, to pass between the old

theatre and the long line of the poor and lowly queued up to thruppence

worth of pictures. For there Florence would slip into the song, the Piazza

della Signoria and the No 1 tram and the Feast of St John, when they lit

the torches of resin on the towers and the children, while the rockets at

nightfall above the Cascine were still flagrant in their memory, opened the

little cages to the glutted cicadae after their long confinement and stayed

out with their young parents long after their usual bed time. Then slowly

in his mind down the sinister Uffizi to the parapets of Arno, and so on and

so forth. This pleasure was dispensed by the Fire Station opposite which

seemed to have been copied here and there from the Palazzo Vecchio. In

deference to Savonarola? Ha! Ha! (MPTK 48-49)

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This cityscape also appears in the story, “Ding – Dong,” with “[. . . ] long straight Pearse

Street, its vast Barrack of Glencullen granite, its home of tragedy respired and enlarged, its coal merchants and Florentine Fire Brigade Station [ . . .].” This walk leads Belacqua to a familiar public house, a place of refuge and forgetfulness:

Here he was known, in the sense that his grotesque exterior had long

ceased to alienate the curates and make them giggle, and to the extent that

he was served with his drink without having to call for it. This did not

always seem a privilege. He was tolerated, what was more, and let alone

by the rough but kindly habitués of the house [ . . .]. (MPTK 41)

However, something unusual has perturbed Belacqua, such that his drinking has no calming effect:

But on this particular occasion the cat failed to jump, with the result that

he became as despondent as though he were sitting at home in his own

great armchair, as anxious to get on the move and quite as hard put to it to

do so. Why this was he could not make out. [ . . .] All he could say was

that the objects in which he was used to find such recreation and repose

lost gradually their hold upon him, he became insensible to them little by

little, the old itch and algos crept back into his mind. He had come briskly

all the way from Tommy Moore, and now he suddenly found himself

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sitting paralysed and grieving in a pub of all places, good for nothing but

to stare at his spoiling porter, and wait for a sign.

To this day he does not know what caused him to look up, but look

up he did.

A woman has entered the pub:

No sooner had she come in than he must have become aware of her. That

was surely very curious in the first instance. She seemed to be hawking

some ware or other, but what it was he could not see .[ . . .] Not that it was

unusual to find a woman in that public-house, for they came and went

freely, slaking their thirst and beguiling their sorrows with no less freedom

than their men-folk . (MPTK 43-44)

Beckett invites us to imagine that Belacqua’s anxiety, his sour and spoiling porter, and the suddenness with which he becomes aware of the woman’s presence, are connected somehow, and are harbingers of something significant about to happen:

Hence there was no earthly reason why he should see anything in the

advancing figure of this mysterious pedlar anything untoward, or in the

nature of the sign in default of which he was clamped to his stool till

closing time. Yet the impulse to do so was so strong that he yielded to it

and as she drew nearer, having met with more rebuffs than pence in her

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endeavors to dispose of her wares, whatever they were, it became clear to

him that his instinct had not played him false, in so far at least as she was a

woman of very remarkable presence indeed.

Her speech was that of a woman of the people, but of a

gentlewoman of the people. Her gown had served its time, but yet

contrived to be respectable. [ . . .] She was of more than average height

and well in flesh. She might be past middle-age. But her face, ah her face,

was what Belacqua had rather refer to as her countenance, it was so full of

light. This she lifted up upon him and no error. Brimful of light and

serene, serenissime, it bore no trace of suffering, and in this alone it might

be a notable face. [ . . .] The features were null, only luminous, impassive

and secure, petrified in radiance, or words to that effect, for the reader is

requested to take notice that this sweet style is Belacqua’s. An act of

expression, he said, a wreathing or wrinkling, could only have had the

effect of a dimmer on a headlight. (MPTK 44-45)

The face, “so full of light,” is a signifier of Dante’s beloved Beatrice, his guide through the spheres of Heaven, whose radiant expression, when trained on Dante’s gaze, actually powers their ascent upwards, beyond the planets and the fixed stars, into the Empyrean itself and God’s presence. The “sweet style” refers to Dante’s own description of his early lyric poetry, written in what he calls the sweet new style, meaning that it is written in Dante’s own vernacular Italian instead of Latin, and celebrates love. The woman now

17 addresses Belacqua. She is selling seats in Heaven, “tuppence apiece, four fer a tanner.”

Belacqua, being a poor man, answers with an automatic “no,” then regrets it:

“The best of seats” she said “again I’m sold out. Tuppence apiece

for the best of seats, four fer a tanner.”

This was unforeseen with a vengeance, if not exactly vaudeville.

Belacqua was embarrassed in the last degree, but transported also. [ . . .]

Belacqua scarcely knew where to look. Unable to blush he came out in

this beastly sweat. Nothing of the kind had ever happened to him before.

He was altogether disarmed, unsaddled and miserable. The eyes of them

all, the dockers, the railwaymen and, most terrible of all, the joxers, were

upon him. His tail drooped. [ . . .] he was at her mercy. (MPTK 45)

The theme of embarrassment, and embarrassment in front of a woman’s radiant countenance, figures highly in Dante’s early work, the Vita Nuova, written some time in his late twenties. The book is a collection of his poetry written in the sweet new style, interspersed with a confessional narrative about his love for Beatrice. If one were to bracket off its poems and its tragic outcome (in which Beatrice, married off to another man, dies at the age of twenty-four), the Vita Nuova would bear an odd similarity to a story that might appear in More Pricks Than Kicks. Dante never tells us precisely why he cannot declare his love directly to Beatrice. Both were presumably engaged to other partners in their early teens, at a time when marriages were arranged by the parents, with property or political alliances uppermost in their decision-making. Beatrice’s family is

18 believed to have been of somewhat higher wealth and social status than Dante’s. Still, these differences should not have been impregnable in a society where well-born youths of both sexes were allowed to mix freely in social situations. So Dante’s omission is a strange one in a book otherwise so emotionally candid. The pain of his unrequited love is only worsened by his need to hide it, yielding complications that would be considered farcical if found in another genre. Dante gazes lovingly on Beatrice in church one day, and his fond expression is intercepted by a young woman sitting between them, who then assumes his ardor is intended for her instead. Dante is satisfied to let the misunderstanding persist, thinking it will aid him in his subterfuge. However, to perpetuate this charade, he must send his “screen lover” the poems he has written with

Beatrice in mind. Florence is a complicated place, awash with loose talk, and naturally the situation starts to spiral out of control. He passes Beatrice in the street one day, but rather than greet him as a familiar yet casual friend, Beatrice cuts him --as the English say--and young Dante is devastated.

At some later time, Dante is invited by a friend to a routine social gathering. It is the custom then in Florence for the friends of a newly wed woman to attend her at her first meal in the home of her bridegroom. At this point we should keep in mind the trepidation in Belacqua’s soul immediately before he sees the radiant common woman in the pub, of how “he suddenly found himself sitting paralysed and grieving in a pub of all places, good for nothing but to stare at his spoiling porter, and wait for a sign.” Dante undergoes something similar when he joins the wedding party:

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[ . . .] I seemed to feel a strange throbbing which began in the left side of

my breast and immediately spread to all parts of my body. Then,

pretending to act naturally, I leaned for support against a painted surface

that extended along the walls of the house and, fearing that people might

have become aware of my trembling, I raised my eyes and, looking at the

ladies, I saw among them the most gracious Beatrice [ . . .]. Now many of

the ladies present, noticing the transformation I had undergone, were

amazed and began to talk about it, joking about me with that most

gracious one. My friend, who had made a mistake in good faith, took me

by the hand and, leading me out of sight of the ladies, asked me what was

wrong. Then I, somewhat restored, for my dead spirits were coming back

to life, and the ones ejected were returning to their rightful domain, said

these words to my friend: ‘I have just set foot on that boundary of life

beyond which no one can go, hoping to return.’ (Vita Nuova 24-25)

The points of alignment between “Ding – Dong” and this episode from Vita

Nuova can be summarized as: a presentiment of something momentous about to happen, followed by an encounter with the radiant face, resulting in embarrassment. Dante reports undergoing a “transformation.” Beckett’s Belacqua is “embarrassed in the last degree, but transported.”

The woman in the pub, it should not be overlooked, is selling seats in Heaven, an allusion to Dante’s Paradiso. Her identity is therefore a superimposition of both the young Beatrice of Vita Nuova and the Beatrice deceased and gone to Heaven some

20 twenty-five years later. The highest realm of Heaven is an indescribably huge white rose whose layers of petals form tiers which are, literally, seats in Heaven. In Paradiso, Mary sits in the place of honor at the highest, outer tier, directly across from John the Baptist, and flanked by St. Peter and Adam. The lower tiers directly beneath and in front of her are occupied by distinguished women of the Old Testament: Eve, Rachel, Sarah Rebecca,

Judith, and Ruth. Dante places Beatrice two rows down from St. Peter’s chair and directly opposite Rachel. Whether the common woman is a cynical grifter or a holy fool,

Belacqua has at first a compelling urge to break contact. But having refused her one more time, he finally gives in:

“Gobbless yer honour” she said, in the same white voice from

which she had not departed. She made to go.

“Here” cried Belacqua “you owe me twopence.” He had not even

the good grace to say tuppence.

“Arragowan” she said “make it four cantcher, yer frien’ yer da, yer

ma an’ yer motte [ i.e. lover].”

Belacqua could not bicker. He had not the strength of mind for

that. He turned away.

“Jesus” she said distinctly “and his sweet mother preserve yer

honour.”

“Amen” said Belacqua, into his dead porter. (MPTK 46)

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She leaves, and the story now ends drily, succinctly, with no further comment on

Belacqua’s state of mind. It is left up to the reader to wonder what impact this experience has had on him, and whether he did, in fact, have a visionary moment, first sensing her presence before he actually sees her, then being “transported” by her face, “so light and serene,” and “petrified in radiance.” The spiritual dimensions of Dante’s Paradiso have been distilled into mock-heroic mode. And the point of overlap – or that which remains after the transfer from one mode to another, is the woman’s radiance, and Belacqua’s reaction: he is transported. The cause and effect, to be examined in full in the following chapter, is known as Rapture. Rapture, put simply, is sentient light, a pervasive trope in both Dante and Beckett, and more fully defined in Dante’s canzone, “Amor che ne la mente mi ragione,” or “Love, which discourses to me yearningly in my mind:”

Things appear in her countenance which show some of the pleasures of

Paradise; these things appear in her eyes and in her sweet smile, where

Love draws them, as to his domain. They overwhelm our intellect, as a ray

of sunlight overwhelms weak sight; and since I cannot steadily gaze on

them, I must be content with saying little of them. Her beauty rains down

flames of fire alive with a noble spirit which is the creator of every good

thought; and like a thunderbolt they shatter the inborn vices, which make

one base .(Convivio 78)

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CHAPTER TWO:

RAPTURE: THE BALCONY OF THE SOUL

Enquiries into the nature of light, and the science of optics had accumulated considerably in the centuries previous to Dante’s time. Aristotle, the philosopher Dante revered and cited frequently in his prose, established the groundwork for a philosophy of light as a transmitter of knowledge with his theory of efficient causality:

He argued that an efficient cause initiated motion and/or produced change

(both which involved the passage from potency to act) in bodies. And he

maintained that this process could only occur when an efficient cause was

itself in act and thus able to actualise forms in the potency of matter. In

other words, Aristotle regarded efficient causality as involving the

communication of something already possessed by the cause to its effect,

an idea which historians of his thought define as a transmission theory of

causality. (Gilson 172)

Ptolemy then elaborated on Aristotle’s theory of efficient causality:

He accepted the traditional view that heavenly bodies exercised causal

power on what was below them by movement, but he enlarged the extent

to which the heavens co-operated in this process, and gave specific

explanations of the way in which each planet imparted its effects. With

regard to the process of transmission, Ptolemy added an important new

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suggestion by stating that a force ‘flowed’ from the ethereal substance of

the stars and descended to the sublunary world [ . . . ]. This is the point at

which the idea of celestial influence begins to emerge as a concept bearing

close etymological connections with the idea of light flowing forth from a

luminous source. The process of illumination, after all, presents quite

precise analogies with the way in which Aristotle believed efficient

causality to operate: a medium is illuminated [ . . . ] when light transmits a

likeness of itself to this medium [ . . . ]. By the late thirteenth century,

almost all the major Western philosophers and theologians expressed

celestial and physical causation with words related to light [ . . . ]. (Gilson

173-74)

But how does light, as efficient cause, make contact with, and influence the human soul?

This is a question taken up later by Avicenna:

For Islamic thinkers, Aristotle’s inability to explain the origin of the

universe was a serious flaw, one which led Avicenna to revise Aristotle’s

concept of efficient causality as a mover or maker through motion by

extending its frame of reference to include creative causality. God

emanates a first Intelligence that reflects upon itself and in turn emanates a

second Intelligence, a celestial sphere and a soul [. . .]. (Gilson 180-81)

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Dante creates a synthesis of efficient causality and creative causality in order to connect love with the soul and the thing beloved of the soul:

Love, if we truly recognize it and carefully consider it, is seen to be

nothing other than a spiritual union between the soul and the thing loved;

the soul by its very nature seeks this union .[ . . . ] Since every effect

retains something of the nature of its cause, every form receives the being

of the divine nature in some way. [ . . . ] And the more noble the form it

contains of that nature; so the human soul, which is the most noble of

these forms generated beneath the heavens, receives more of the divine

nature than any other such form. (Convivio 81)

In explicating his canzone quoted in the previous chapter, in which Dante writes of the things that “appear in her countenance which show some of the pleasures of Paradise,” such that they “overwhelm our intellect, as a ray of sunlight overwhelms weak sight,” he singles out the facial features as the soul’s most sensitive manifestation, because:

[ . . . ] in the face the soul is most fully active in two places because all

three natures of the soul have a certain function to perform in those two

places – that is, in the eyes and in the mouth – it especially adorns those,

and there strives, with all its power to create something beautiful, if

possible. I say that it is in these two places that these pleasures appear, at

the words: in her eyes and in her sweet smile. These two places may be

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called, in a lovely simile, balconies of the lady who inhabits the edifice of

the body – I refer to the soul – for there, although under a veil as it were,

she often reveals herself .(Convivio 97-98)

The formula for Rapture, therefore, is sentient light which, originating with God, and manifested in the most articulate part of the soul, overwhelms our intellect and brings knowledge of our creator. The formula is pervasive throughout Paradiso in the figure of

Beatrice, in which the eyes, lips, and divine inspiration gather in a matrix of imagery:

Then Beatrice looked at me with eyes so full

of sparks of love, eyes so divine that my

own force of sight was overcome, took flight,

and, eyes downcast, I almost lost my senses. (4, 139-42)

[ . . . ] for in the smile that glowed within her eyes,

I thought that I—with mine—had touched the height

of both my blessedness and paradise. (15, 34-36)

[ . . .] that even as I gazed at her, my soul

was free from any other need as long

as the Eternal Loveliness that shone

on Beatrice directly, from her eyes,

contented me with the reflected light. (18, 14-18)

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[ . . .] and saw such purity within her eyes,

such joy, that her appearance now surpassed

its guise at other times, even the last. (18, 55-57)

We have already noted Beckett’s mock-heroic re-appropriation of Beatrice’s divine expression in “Ding – Dong,” with the common woman’s face “so light and serene” and “petrified in radiance.” In the decades following the publication of More

Pricks Than Kicks in 1934, the imagery of lips and eyes recurs as signifiers of divine and human love, usually connected to a maternal or Beatrice-like figure. In How It Is, the novel completed in 1960 – after Krapp’s Last Tape and right before Happy Days, we find the same matrix in an early memory of the unnamed narrator:

[ . . .] my mother’s face I see it from below its like nothing I ever saw

we are on a veranda smothered in verbena the scented sun dapples the red

tiles yes I assure you

the huge head hatted with birds and flowers bowed down over my curls

the eyes burn with severe love I offer her mine pale up cast to the sky

whence cometh our help and which I know perhaps even then with time

shall pass away

in a word bolt upright on a cushion on my knees whelmed in a nightshirt I

pray according to her instructions

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that’s not all she closes her eyes and drones a snatch of the so – called

Apostles’ Creed I steal a look at her lips

she stops her eyes burn down on me again I cast up mine in haste and

repeat awry

the air thrills with the hum of insects. (How It Is 15-16)

In Beckett’s plays, Rapture can even be pushed to absurd or violent extremes. In

Play, from 1963, light becomes a harsh, accusatorial force, probing the faces of the three speakers onstage, a man, his wife, and his mistress. Beckett went to considerable pains in synchronizing the movement of a single spotlight from one speaker to the next in order to produce the desired effect of a light source essentially switching on, then switching off, the actors’ voices, thereby suggesting that this tale of adultery and betrayal is being extracted from them through force by some pitiless higher power. This is a complete inversion of conventional theatrical practice, in which lighting is expected to serve, or even flatter, the performer. Play begins and ends in darkness. Beckett’s Happy Days takes an opposite route: the entire play takes place under Blazing light according to

Beckett’s own stage direction. (Happy Days 7)

Happy Days can be considered as an example of sustained, continuous Rapture. It is also a love story, and the only play in Beckett’s canon that focuses on romantic and enduring love. Although its heroine, Winnie, could not in any strict sense be taken as a

Beatrice figure, Beckett nevertheless privileges her lips and eyes in an extraordinary manner, and emphasizes the sense of sight to such a degree that it becomes a function of character, and a means by which Winnie defines her existence.

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There is nothing conventionally romantic about Beckett’s stage picture, as Act

One begins with its blazing light, and its “[e]xpanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound”:

[ . . .] imbedded up to above her waist in exact centre of mound, WINNIE.

About fifty, well preserved, blond for preference, plump, arms and

shoulders bare, low bodice, big bosom, pearl necklet. She is discovered

sleeping, her arms on the ground before her, her head on her arms. [ . . . ]

To her right and rear, lying asleep on the ground, hidden by mound,

WILLIE. (7-8)

Act Two will begin with Winnie buried up to her neck. Though we might assume that

Winnie progresses from bad to worse in the course of the play, Winnie betrays our expectations: her first words in Act One are, “Another heavenly day” (8). Act Two begins with her uttering, “Hail, holy light” (49).

We are never given any indication of just where these people are, or how they got there. We do, however, learn that there is no longer any night, and that Winnie begins and ends each day with the harsh ringing of an offstage bell. Confounding our expectations again, Winnie shows no distress over being half-buried in the earth. What she actually fears is being set loose from it:

Is gravity what it was, Willie, I fancy not. [ . . . ] Yes, the feeling more and

more that if I were not held – (gesture) – in this way, I would simply float

up into the blue. [ . . . ] And that perhaps some day the earth will yield and

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let me go, the pull is so great, yes, crack all round me and let me out. [ . . .]

Don’t you ever have that feeling, Willie, of being sucked up? [ . . . ] Don’t

you have to cling on sometimes, Willie? (33-34)

And, speaking of the desolate wasteland that holds them captive, Winnie remarks,

“[w]hat a blessing nothing grows, imagine if all this stuff were to start growing” (34) .

Our normal assumptions about the function of memory, and of cause and effect, are also in suspension. Even if their situation were to change, Winnie says, they would have no way of perceiving it; nothing changes, nothing is ever better or worse than before. In Act

One she raises a parasol above herself, and it catches fire:

Smoke, flames if feasible. She sniffs, looks up, throws parasol to her right

behind mound, cranes back to watch it burning. [ . . . ] I presume this has

occurred before, though I cannot recall it. [ . . . ] It is no hotter today than

yesterday, it will be no hotter tomorrow than today, how could it, and so

on back into the far past, forward into the far future. [ . . . ] And should

one day the earth cover my breasts, then I shall never have seen my

breasts, no one ever seen my breasts. [ . . . ] The sunshade will be there

again tomorrow, beside me on this mound, to help me through the day.

(37-39)

These words prove to be prophetic, as Act Two begins with “parasol as before” (49).

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Having established a location which upends our common notions of physics and causality, Beckett also endows Winnie with a gestural language which also runs counter to the commonplace. The meticulously choreographed stage directions compel Winnie to smile whenever she utters a negation, as in this passage:

Sometimes I am wrong. (Smile.) But not often . (Smile off.) Sometimes all

is over, for the day, all done, all said, all ready for the night, and the day

not over, far from over, the night not ready, far, far from ready. (Smile.)

But not often. (Smile off.) (44)

The fleeting smile also recurs every time her ruminations touch upon the notion of day following night, or of time having some relation to linear progression:

That’s what I find so wonderful, that not a day goes by - (smile) – to

speak in the old style – (smile off) – hardly a day, without some addition to

one’s knowledge. (18)

The day is now well advanced. (Smile.) To speak in the old style. (Smile

off.) (32)

I’ll leave you out, that’s what I’ll do. (She lays revolver on ground to her

right.) There, that’s your home from this day out. (Smile.) The old style!

(Smile off.) (33)

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Beckett also utilizes this pattern to hint that not only has time been upended, but that Winnie and Willie are no longer, in the “old style,” mortal, that they now occupy a kind of Limbo:

Whereas if you were to die – (smile) – to speak in the old style – (smile

off) – or go away and leave me, then what would I do, what could I do.

[ . . . ] (21)

Beckett’s stage directions require the same precision and co-ordination with Winnie’s eyes as well as her lips. Many of the props she handles relate to her sense of vision: her spectacles, her magnifying glass, and her mirror, as shown in this passage in which she brushes and inspects her teeth, and tries to read the printing on her toothbrush handle:

(brings out small mirror, turns back front) – ah yes – (inspects teeth in

mirror) – poor dear Willie – (testing upper front teeth with thumb,

indistinctly) – good Lord! – ( pulling back upper lip to inspect gums, do.)

– good God! – (pulling back corner of mouth, mouth open, do. ) – ah well

– (other corner, do.) – no worse – (abandons inspection, normal speech) –

no better, no worse – (lays down mirror) – no change- (wipes fingers on

grass) – no pain - (looks for toothbrush) – hardly any- (takes up

toothbrush) – great thing that – (examines handle of brush) – nothing like

it – (examines handle, reads) – pure . . . what? – (pause) – what? (lays

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down brush) – ah yes – (turns towards bag) – poor Willie – (rummages in

bag) – no zest – (rummages) – for anything – (brings out spectacles in

case) – no interest – (turns back front) – in life – (takes spectacles from

case) – poor dear Willie – (lays down case) – sleep forever – (opens

spectacles) – marvelous gift – (puts on spectacles) [ . . .]. (9-10)

To see--and to be seen--are the determiners of Winnie’s existence. Buried up to her neck in Act Two, and now denied the use of spectacles, magnifying glass, and mirror, Winnie still strives for visual knowledge of her presence:

The face. (Pause.) The nose. (She squints down.) I can see it . . . (squinting

down) . . . the tip . . .the nostrils . . .breath of life . . . that curve you so

admired . . . (pouts) . . . a hint of lip. . . (pouts again) . . . if I pout them

out . . . (sticks out tongue) . . . the tongue of course . . . you so admired . . .

if I stick it out . . . (sticks it out again) . . . the tip . . .(eyes up) . . .

suspicion of brow . . . imagination possibly . . . (52-53)

But what matters most of all to Winnie is to see, and be seen by Willie, who lives in a hole behind her and to the right. He has a limited degree of mobility that Winnie lacks: he can at least crawl out of his hole if he wishes, sun himself, apply lotion to his legs, change his clothes; but he apparently only has enough power to crawl a little.

Winnie has to strain herself to get a full look at him:

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Could you see me, Willie, do you think, from where you are if you were to

raise your eyes in my direction? (turns a little further.) Lift your eyes to

me, Willie, and tell me can you see me, do that for me, I’ll lean back as far

as I can. (Does so. Pause.) No? (Pause.) Well never mind. (Turns back

painfully front.) (28)

Crick in my neck admiring you. (Rubs neck.) But it’s worth it, well worth

it. [ . . . ] Do you know what I dream sometimes? [ . . . ] That you’ll come

round and live this side where I could see you . . .[ . . . ] I’d be a different

woman [ . . .]. Unrecognizable. [ . . . ] Or just now and then, come round

this side just every now and then and let me feast on you . (45-46)

In the play’s last moments, Willie is finally seen in full view, laboriously climbing up the mound on all fours to face Winnie at last, and wearing wedding attire:

“ [ . . .] dressed to kill – top hat, morning coat, striped trousers, etc., white gloves in hand” (63). He slides backwards, and lays his head on the ground, while Winnie encourages him: “Have another go, Willie, I’ll cheer you on” (63). He utters her name faintly. Winnie sings a melody from The Merry Widow, a tune heard earlier in Act One from the ruins of a music box, then the play ends with the two of them “feasting,” gazing at each other.

If played in a realistic bourgeois parlor, this scene would be sentimental, and almost embarrassingly saccharine. But set in an arid wasteland, with Winnie buried up to her neck and Willie crawling upwards like an insect, it assumes another dimension

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entirely, and we realize that every inch of this infernal landscape exists to serve as an expression of their devotion to one another. Light, blazing light, which saturates the play, is Beckett’s metaphor for love, which is intertwined with vision, which is an emanation of the divine. For as much as Winnie calls our attention to the “hellish sun” (25), and the

“blaze of hellish light” (11), she counterbalances these outbursts with “holy light” (11), and “heavenly day” (8), and “Hail, holy light” (49), and senses that there still exists some divine power in the universe:

Strange feeling. [ . . .] Strange feeling that someone’s looking at me. I am

clear, then dim, then gone, then dim again, then clear again, and so on,

back and forth, in and out of someone’s eye .(40)

Someone is looking at me still. (Pause.) Caring for me still. (Pause.) That

is what I find so wonderful. (Pause.) Eyes on my eyes. (50)

The power of vision, therefore, originates from above, in accordance with Aristotle’s law of efficient causality, as Dante phrases it in the Convivio: “[s]ince every effect retains something of the nature of its cause, every form receives the being of the divine nature in some way.” As Winnie is being watched from above, she in turn watches that which is below; and she employs two levels of magnification, her spectacles and the glass, when she observes beneath her an ant:

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Oh I say, what have we here? (Bending head to ground, incredulous.)

Looks like life of some kind! (Looks for spectacles, puts them on, bends

closer. Pause.) An emmet! (Recoils. Shrill.) Willie, an emmet, a live

emmet! (Seizes magnifying glass, bends to ground again, inspects through

glass.) Where’s it gone? (Inspects.) Ah! (Follows its progress through

grass.) Has a little white ball in its arms. [ . . . ] Like a little white ball.

(29-30)

To which Willie replies, “Eggs.” However small in scale, generative power still exists in their world, a notion punctuated with Willie’s outburst, “Formication,” (a word denoting the sensation of ants crawling over one’s skin) which Winnie apparently mishears as fornication. The confusion inspires a laughing fit between them, which in turn inspires an evocation of the divine when Winnie then says, “How can one better magnify the

Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?” (31)

Happy Days does not figure largely in previous Dante/Beckett intertextual studies, mainly because there are no parallel passages or verbal allusions from Dante. The closest some scholars have come is in assigning the play as part of Beckett’s infernal or purgatorial vision. In Happy Days the similarities are structural and philosophical. One can at least affirm that Winnie and Willie are not in Hell, because the Dantean Inferno is virtually defined by the absence of hope, and Winnie begins her day with prayer, and lives in hope that her day will have been another happy day. They might suffer, as some souls suffer in Purgatory, and they can deteriorate, but they cannot die. There is nothing

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“absurd” about their circumstances when we consider that their world is coherent in the sense that a controlling philosophy is present: one of sentient light originating in the divine, and extending in an unbroken chain to humanity, burrowed in their little orb, and in turn down to the ants bearing their own little orbs.

There is a passage in Paradiso which exemplifies the world of Happy Days, in which vision is conjoined with the continuous chain of creation. In Canto 22, having ascended from the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, Dante is invited to climb the celestial ladder that leads to the eighth heaven, the sphere of the fixed constellations, and then encouraged to look down and experience the distance he has traveled:

[ . . . ] and I

saw clearly how they vary their positions.

And all the seven heavens showed to me

their magnitudes, their speeds, the distances

of each from each. The little threshing floor

that so incites our savagery was all –

from hills to river mouths – revealed to me [ . . . ]. (22, 146-52)

The sight of earth, “the little threshing floor,” causes Dante to smile for the third and final time in the Commedia:

My eyes returned through all the seven spheres

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and saw this globe in such a way that I

smiled at its scrawny image [ . . . ]. (133-35)

The “scrawny image,” in Dante’s Italian, is “vil sembiant.” It is also translated as

“paltry,” and as its cognate, “vile,” thereby sharing that whiff of disparagement with

Krapp’s “muckball” (CSP 56), and Winnie’s “earthball” (Happy Days 52). This image of the world, or imago mundi, as a threshing floor, as a canvas on which human aspirations are painted, scratched, or scumbled, is the subject of the following chapter.

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CHAPTER THREE:

TYPOS: THE FOOTPRINT OF THE CREATOR

We last saw Dante looking down from Saturn and perceiving his home planet as puny, vile, insignificant – a vision that makes him smile. Beckett, making a note of his smile, might have realized that they were looking at the same thing: Winnie’s earthball,

Krapp’s muckball. That is us. In Beckett’s work, we cling to the vile orb’s surface, which is often muddy or treacherous. “I lay at full stretch, with outspread arms,”

Molloy tells us:

In the ditch the grass was thick and high, I took off my hat and pressed

about my face the long leafy stalks. Then I could smell the earth, the

smell of the earth was in the grass that my hands wove round my face till

I was blinded. I ate a little too, a little grass. (Three Novels 27)

We cling to it in fear of the Judgment that does or does not hover above us. But far stronger than fear is our desire to love and be loved in return. That is what makes us fall and embrace our mother the earth. We wallow in it, roll upon it, crawl on it on all fours:

His hands at the ends of the long outstretched arms clutched the grass,

each hand a tuft with as much energy as if he had been spread-eagled

against the face of a cliff. (Three Novels 239)

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And then when we manage to walk upright, we walk in pain, or we walk crookedly, or aimlessly, or walk on crutches. The mother is not so much cruel as she is unresponsive, oblivious, or deaf, obliging us to communicate, as Molly does, by rapping on her head (Three Novels 18).

We knock as a means to break and enter another consciousness or another surface on which we can leave our mark. This is the foundation of Typos. Our English word type derives from the Greek root, typos, meaning to hit, blow, or strike. Type, in its earliest English definition (i.e. long before we had moveable type, or typewriters), refers specifically to religious prefigurations: Biblical figures that can be superimposed on one another so that, for example, an Old Testament figure prefigures one from the

New Testament. Adam and Christ are paired together in medieval folklore as being of the same type, in that both were perfect creations of God. Similarly, the tree of knowledge in Eden is juxtaposed with the cross on which Christ was crucified: one represents mankind’s downfall, and the other his redemption.

The study of such resemblances is called typology. They are not so much resemblances, however, as they are the castings from a single ideological mold, or the impressions make by one signet ring on different clumps of soft wax. The latter is an image that occurs throughout the Commedia, such as:

Revolving nature, serving as a seal

for mortal wax, plies well its art, but it

does not distinguish one house from another. (Par. 8, 127-29)

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The greatest minister of nature--he

who imprints earth with heaven’s worth [ . . .]. (Par. 10, 28-29)

By philosophic arguments

and by authority whose source is here,

that love must be imprinted in me [ . . .]. (Par. 26, 26-27)

Typos differs from Rapture because instead of light, there is a disruption of light, and an actual physical striking down which leaves a mark, or wound, or dent – which is how it joins up with our sense of type as a printed symbol or word. The act of writing itself is a form of Typos. In the technology available to Beckett, for example, words were composed on a typewriter: each individual letter, number, and punctuation mark is designated its own little hammer, which not only inks the page but leaves a bruise, rupture, or a bleeding-through of the paper’s fabric. The violence is a necessary part of the process, because how else would that other essential technology of Beckett’s age

(i.e. carbon paper) work? The American poet Charles Olson, contemporary with

Beckett, considers the cosmological aspect of Typos in a lecture from 1968:

[ . . . ] it’s type, and is typology, and is typification, and is, in a sense,

that standing condition of . . . I mean standing, really, in the very literal

sense of substantive or object or manifest or solid or material. We get our

word type – which interests me, I suppose, as a writer – from it. If any of

you have ever seen a piece of movable type, at the bottom is the letter

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and the block is above. So that in order, really, to imagine a printer doing

it . . . he’s under your words in order to make the letters of them. Which

always delights me, literally, as a problem of creation. In fact, literally, I

would go so far - you will excuse my Americanism – to think that you

write that way. That you write as though you were underneath the

letters. And I take that a hell of a lot larger. I would think that the hoof-

print of the creator is on the bottom of creation, in exactly the same

sense. (Olson 42-43)

Beckett’s “hoof-print” can be found embedded in the overlapping strata of his creations, and one can only wonder at times whether it is unconscious. It appears as a kind of signature: a sequence of signs that trigger associations among themselves once they are put in play by a key emotion or a unifying idea. In Krapp’s Last Tape, for example, Krapp recalls the moment he was sitting in a park, and saw the blinds on his mother’s window descending, signaling the time of her death:

[ . . . ] the blind went down, one of those dirty brown roller affairs,

throwing a ball for a little white dog as chance would have it. I happened

to look up and there it was. All over and done with, at last. I sat for a few

moments, with the ball in my hand and the dog yelping, and pawing at

me [ . . . ]. In the end I held it out to him and he took it in his mouth,

gently, gently. A small, old, black, hard, solid rubber ball. [ . . . ] I shall

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feel it in my hand, until my dying day. (Pause.) I might have kept it.

(Pause.) But I gave it to the dog. (Collected Shorter Plays 54)

In Molloy we find a similar series of associations:

I thought almost without stopping, I did not dare stop. Perhaps that was

the cause of my innocence. It was a little the worse for wear, a little

threadbare perhaps, but I was glad to have it, yes, I suppose. Thanks, I

suppose, as the urchin said when I picked up his marble, I don’t know

why, I didn’t have to, and I suppose he would have preferred to pick it

up himself. Or perhaps it wasn’t to be picked up. And the effort it cost

me, with my stiff leg. The words engraved themselves forever on my

memory [ . . . ]. (Three Novels 49)

Imagine one of these passages superimposed on the other, and the outline of the hoof-print can be discerned by a pattern of points: (a) the transfer of an orb (ball; marble) to (b) a lesser being or social inferior (dog; urchin) accomplished with (c) a minimum degree of volition (“I might have kept it”; “I didn’t have to”). We can also see that the transfer of the orb involves (d) a demotion of the speaker’s status. Krapp has been roped into being the dog’s playmate; Molloy has inconvenienced himself for a barely appreciative child. Furthermore, to each of these episodes Beckett appends (e) a phrase relating to the persistence of memory (“I shall feel it until my dying day”;

“words engraved forever on my memory”).

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In each case the unifying idea or emotion which pressed this pattern into place is a feeling of loss: Krapp witnessing the departure of someone important to him; Molloy bemoaning the creeping deterioration of his thought processes grown “threadbare.” We should also note that the death of Krapp’s mother parallels his surrender of the black ball to the white dog, thereby giving over the black imago mundi, or earth mother to the gaping maw of white death. In conventional iconography the mother figure is usually associated with purity, or the color white, whereas death is traditionally black. This situation, with its color reversal, is a prefiguration in miniature of Ill Seen Ill Said, to be discussed in a later chapter.

But to envision the world from a great distance as a puny mudball is a rare thing, granted mainly to mystics, and to mortals such as Dante and Beckett privileged with the occasional visionary experience. We spend most of our lives entrenched in a world of overwhelming complexity and scale. Our bodies themselves are instruments of Typos, with which we inscribe a text on the surface of the world using our feet, our footprints, and our shadows. As recounted in Chapter One, it is the lyric impulse of Dante’s poetry that Beckett notices in Purgatorio, inspiring him to underline “il tremolar de la marina,” the trembling of the sea. He is only marginally interested in Dante the allegorist and theological thinker; whereas he is captivated by the unlikely intrusion of a footnote such as Belacqua. Our notion of the Commedia as a work of grand and epic proportions has become a commonplace assumption, but Dante himself never referred to his masterpiece as an epic. In his age, an epic would be written in Latin. His decision to write a poem of such length and ambition in his vernacular Italian made him his time’s equivalent of the avant-garde. It was a choice he felt called upon to defend in a

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letter to one of his patrons, Can Grande della Scala, explaining that the purpose of his work was “to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of felicity”-- in other words, a story with a happy ending, a comedy (Dante

Literary Criticism 101-2). And “comedy”, as Dante explains, is derived from the Greek words meaning a rustic song. Dante is a pastoral poet, and the task of leading the soul from misery to felicity involves celebrating in song the beauty of the world, such as its sky, whose “fair Aurora’s white and scarlet cheeks were, as Aurora aged, becoming orange” (Purg. 3, 7-10); and the fragrance of the earth:

[ . . . ] nature there not only was a painter,

but from the sweetness of a thousand odors,

she had derived an unknown mingled scent [ . . . ]. (Purg. 7, 79-81)

Or the force of the wind:

As does a tree that bends its crown because

of winds that gust, and then springs up, raised by

its own sustaining power [ . . . ]. (Par. 26, 85-87)

And the beasts of the field:

Even as sheep that move, first one, then two,

then three, out of the fold – the others also

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stand, eyes and muzzles lowered, timidly;

and what the first sheep does, the others do,

and if it halts, they huddle close behind,

simple and quiet and not knowing why [ . . . ]. (Purg. 3, 79-84)

Rather than being stock effects or kennings, these images seem to be derived from first-hand observation. Beckett shares with him this sense of the immediacy of nature. It is a gift that flows from him so spontaneously that even his casual correspondence sometimes reads like poetry:

The best days have been these spent walking with the dogs. One was

especially lovely, over the fields from here across the 3 Rock & 2 Rock

& back by Glencullen & the Lead Mines. It was so still that from the top

of 2 Rock I could hear a solitary accordeon [sic] played down near the

Glencullen river, miles away. I thought of a Xmas morning not long ago

standing at the back of the Scalp with Father, hearing singing coming

from the Glencullen Chapel. Then the white air you can see so far

through, giving the outlines without the stippling. Then the pink & green

sunset that I never find anywhere else and when it was quite dark a little

pub to rest and drink gin in. (Letters 239)

This is from a letter the twenty-eight year old Beckett wrote to his friend

Thomas McGreevy on New Year’s Day, 1935. Eleven years later, while writing his

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novel Mercier and Camier, he cannot resist undercutting somewhat his affection for the landscape:

Under its heather mask the quag allures, with an allurement not all

mortals can resist. Then it swallows them up or the mist comes down.

The city is not far either, from certain points its lights can be seen by

night, its light rather, and by day its haze. Even the piers of the harbour

can be distinguished, on very clear days, of the two harbours, tiny arms

in the glassy sea outflung, known flat, seen raised. And the islands and

promontories, one has only to stop and turn at the right place, and of

course by night the beacon lights, both flashing and revolving. It is here

one would lie down, in a hollow bedded with dry heather, and fall asleep,

for the last time, on an afternoon, in the sun, head down among the

minute life of stems and bells, and fast fall asleep, fast farewell to

charming things. It’s a birdless sky, the odd raptor, no song. End of

descriptive passage. (Mercier and Camier 97-98)

And so this world, so vividly realized, is laid out for us with paths and signposts which mark our presence and trace patterns that become signs for our feelings and beliefs. Dante, parting ways with Beatrice near the conclusion of Paradiso, recalls how she initiated his spiritual journey by summoning Virgil from Limbo, and “who for my salvation did endure to leave her footprints on the floor of Hell” (31, 80-1). The footprint set in motion in Beckett’s Company also tells a story, as the nameless “you”

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who finally manages to walk instead of crawl, finds himself incapable of traveling through the meadow, as he had before, in a “beeline”:

Halfway across the pasture on your beeline to the gap. The unerring feet

fast. You look behind you as you could not then and see their trail. A

great swerve. Withershins. Almost as if all at once the heart too heavy. In

the end too heavy. (Nohow On 26-27)

The heart, weighed down by a lifetime’s accumulation of sorrow, has thrown the body out of balance and caused it to write a swerve, a downward curve, on the world’s canvas. As fallen beings, we have an unfortunate tendency not to walk in a straight line, as Molly, lost in the forest, observes:

[ . . . ] that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight

line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle,

hoping this way to go in a straight line. (Three Novels 85)

Another form of Typos expands upon type to describe a literal text printed on the body. In How It Is Beckett chooses as a starting point the seventh canto of Inferno, where the Wrathful and Sullen are confined to the muddy depths of the river Styx. Here,

Dante relates how:

[ . . . ] muddied people in that slime,

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all naked and their faces furious.

These struck each other not with hands alone,

but with their head and chests and with their feet,

and tore each other piecemeal with their teeth.

The kindly master told me: “Son, now see

the souls of those whom anger has defeated;

and I should also have you know for certain

that underneath the water there are souls

who sigh and make this plain of water bubble [ . . . ].”

( Inferno 7, 110-19)

How It Is is a transitional work, marking the point at which Beckett’s prose sheds the features of narrative fiction – such as a perceivable setting and characters – and foregrounds the voice as an unfixed persona, or series of personae. Without any other referents, the voice is the only “reality” we encounter. The result presents us with the paradox of a precisely scripted void in which, as Caselli explains:

[ . . . ] the absence of punctuation and the syntax maximize the process of

choosing between alternative meanings and following different

associative patterns. The chosen version is constantly haunted by the

abandoned combinations, leading us to establish hierarchies and to

acknowledge the instability of the text, which can be thought of as the

impossible sum of the various patterns. (Caselli 148-49)

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We are introduced to this radical method in the opening sentence: “How it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as

I hear it” (7). Already it is questionable whether the “I” is acting or being acted upon, because “I say it as I hear it” implies that everything that follows is not his own experience, but something recited – an impression reinforced when he describes himself as “scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine” (7). And that he is some form of a dead or departed soul is suggested when he tells us, “no appetite a crumb of tunny then mouldy eat mouldy no need to worry I won’t die I’ll never die of hunger” (8). The unstabilized language becomes a smokescreen from which murky concepts of location and identity emerge in fragmentary form. There is a past and a present; there are hints of a previous life “above” in the light, to contrast with the present one in which “I” crawl in the mud and slake my thirst by dragging my tongue in it. Crawling forward in a straight line, I throw my limbs around some other prostrate form and torment it, after which I will crawl apace until my own tormentor catches up with me. The torment takes the form of creating a text which in turn prompts a reaction from the tormented:

with the nail then of the right index in great capitals two full lines the

shorter the communication the greater the capitals one has only to know

a little beforehand what one wants to say he feels the great ornate letter

the snakes the imps God be praised it won’t be long YOU PIM pause

YOU PIM in the furrows here a difficulty has he grasped no knowing

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stab him simply in the arse that is to say speak and he will say

anything what he can whereas proof I need proof so stab him in a certain

way signifying answer once and for all which I do therefore what an

improvement how I’ve improved. (71)

The equation for torture, interrogation, and confession can be discerned in this undetermined text we are left to ourselves to punctuate: “stab him [ . . . ] that is to say speak.” To stab is to speak, which elicits speech in turn. As a result, “he will say anything,” so that a certain skill is required. Therefore, “stab him in a certain way,” in order to achieve satisfactory results, an honest reply and “proof.” That the tormenter has progressed in his skill is indicated with the snakes and imps that adorn his great capitals like the flourishes of a medieval illuminated manuscript.

Formulating text through torture is also the method found in Beckett’s Rough for

Radio II written sometime in the early sixties, but not broadcast until 1976. In his prose and plays, Beckett has remarkably little to say about what might be called the literary life. Molloy is apparently a writer of sorts, being visited weekly by a man who “gives me money and takes way the pages. So many pages, so much money” (Three Novels 7).

But after the book’s first page we learn nothing more about this side of his character.

Krapp was a writer at some time, but Beckett is laconic as well about his career.

“Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the sea. Getting known” (CSP 56). But the central figure in Rough, known as

Animator, is a former book reviewer, eager to engage his assistant, Stenographer, in literary talk:

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A. [ . . . ]Have you read the Purgatory, miss, of the divine Florentine?

S. Alas no, sir. I have merely flipped through the Inferno.

A. (incredulous) Not read the Purgatory?

S. Alas no, sir.

A. There all sigh, I was, I was. It’s like a knell. Strange, is it not?

S. In what sense, sir?

A. Why, one would rather have expected, I shall be. No? (CSP 116)

Animator’s last two lines here allude to a remark James Joyce once made to Beckett:

Richard Ellman records how Beckett recalled a comment Joyce had once

made to him about Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘What runs through the whole of

Dante is less the longing for Paradise than the nostalgia for being.

Everyone in the poem says “Io fui” – I was, I was.’ (Haughton 142)

This distinction in tenses, of which Animator seems so fond, will play out in the denouement; Animator appears to have what might be called a fetish for tenses.

In Rough’s audio mise-en-scene, Animator and Stenographer collude with the non-speaking henchman Dick in the ritualized interrogation of the prisoner, Fox. Each of the three perpetrators is identified with a percussive typological sound effect:

Animator thumps a ruler to punctuate his commands; Dick strikes the prisoner with a bull’s pizzle; Stenographer records the prisoner’s words with the audible scratch of a

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pencil. Along with the explicit book chatter, Rough is also an anomaly in Beckett’s canon for its undertone of prurience coupled with vicious black comedy and driven forward by exhortations and sound effects:

A. Does not the glare incommode you, miss, what if we should let down

the blind?

S. Thank you, sir, not on my account, it can never be too warm, never

too bright, for me. But, with your permission, I shall shed my overall.

A. (with alacrity) Please do, miss, please do. (pause.) Staggering!

Staggering! Ah were I but . . . forty years younger!

S. (reading) “Ah my God my God.” (Blow with pencil.) “My God.”

A. Crabbed youth! No pity! (Thump with ruler.) Do you mark me? On!

(Silence.) Dick! (Swish and thud of pizzle on flesh. Faint cry from Fox.)

(CSP 115)

Perhaps this is Beckett’s tongue-in-cheek homage to Genet. A cloud of unreason hovers over the proceedings. We never learn why Fox is being tortured, or what sort of information is expected of him, and Animator admits as much: “[o]f course we do not know, any more than you, what exactly it is we are after, what sign or set of words”

(120). Still, the grisly work must go forward. Animator orders Stenographer to kiss the prisoner, for “perhaps that will stir some fibre.”

S. Where, sir?

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A. In his heart, in his entrails—or some other part.

S. No, I mean kiss him where, sir?

A. (angry) Why on his stinker of a mouth, What do you suppose?

(Stenographer kisses Fix. Howl from Fox.) Till it bleeds! Kiss it white!

(Howl from Fox.) Suck his gullet!

(Silence.)

S. He has fainted away, sir. (121)

With an unconscious subject on their hands, they now have to rely on transcripts from previous session, and it is here Animator finally finds the breakthrough he has sought for:

A. May we have that passage again, miss?

S. “Have yourself opened, Maud would say, opened--”

A. (delighted) That frequentative! (Pause.) Sorry, miss.

S. “Have yourself opened, Maud would say, opened--”

A. Don’t skip, miss, the text in its entirety if you please.

S. I skip nothing, sir. (Pause.) What have I skipped, sir?

A. (emphatically) “. . . between two kisses . . .” (Sarcastic.) That mere

trifle! (Angry.) How can we ever hope to get anywhere if you suppress

gems of that magnitude?

S. But, sir, he never said anything of the kind.

A. (angry) “ . . . Maud would say, between two kisses etc. Amend.

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S. But, sir, I—

A. What the devil are you deriding, miss? My hearing? My memory? My

good faith? (Thunderous.) Amend!

S. (feebly) As you will, sir. (122-23)

The “frequentative” that so delights Animator is merely the verb construction in “would say,” indicating a past action performed repeatedly, and a subtle shift in grammar echoed by his fondness for the tense differences in Purgatorio of “I am” and “I shall be.” The diabolic work he performs on Fox has to be sweetened with pathos, “kisses,”

So that he might have the satisfaction of putting his personal stamp on the work at hand.

Therefore he defies his own protocols and behaves as any editor might, desiring to add sentiment to a story. The imperative tense he savors with the exhortations “bleed it white” and “suck his gullet” and the thunderous “amend,” is itself a weapon equal to the blows of ruler and pizzle. Even the organ of speech itself, Stenographer’s mouth, becomes a weapon used against the victim. Beckett’s frenetic soundscape takes the typology of text on body to sadistic and darkly comic extremes to demonstrate how the misuse and abuse of language threatens the integrity of one’s soul.

A more subtle form of menace lurks in Footfalls, Beckett’s most visually elaborate theatrical statement on the Typos of the feet. But because its full impact relies upon the elucidation of another form of Rapture, it is the subject of a separate chapter, which now follows.

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CHAPTER FOUR:

RAPTURE II: THE TREACHEROUS MOON

In Footfalls, first performed in 1976, the only signifier of a woman’s existence to herself is the sound of her own pacing. The onstage movements of the character M

(or May) are rigidly choreographed by Beckett, with instructions that the lighting, faint as it is, falls mainly on her feet. The other character, present only in voice, is V, May’s mother. The play’s first “act” is a dialogue between the two as May paces deliberately inside a narrow strip of dimly lit stage, nine paces to the left, then turning and taking nine paces to the right, and then repeating the pattern. Regarding May’s footsteps, V says, “I heard you in my deep sleep [ . . . ]. There is no sleep so deep I would not hear you there” (CSP 237). The words might strike us first as expressions of maternal solicitude; the way, for example, a new mother comes instantly awake upon hearing her infant’s cries. In the rhythmic conversation that follow, May offers to perform the ministrations required of a dying patient:

M. Would you like me to inject you again?

V. Yes, but it is too soon,

M. Would you like me to change your position again?

V. Yes, but it is too soon. (CSP 238)

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Gradually it dawns on us that May’s pacing might not be a reassurance to V but an irritant, as the mother asks, “Will you never have done? [ . . . ] Will you never have done . . . revolving it all [ . . . ] in your poor mind?” (238-9).

The second “act” is a monologue by the unseen V, in which she tells another side of their story while May continues pacing:

I say the floor here, now bare, this strip of floor, once was carpeted, a

deep pile. Till one night, while still little more than a child, she called her

mother and said, Mother, this is not enough [ . . .]. I mean, Mother, that I

must hear the feet, however faint they fall. (239)

We have heard the last of V. The third “act” belongs to M alone, who tells yet another part of the story, which continues as a dialogue between mother and daughter, but now the characters’ names have changed. May is now Amy, and V is Old Mrs.

Winter. And the tone has shifted to a stilted, more consciously “literary” style, as Amy begins with the words, “Sequel . . . sequel,” and speaks of herself in the third person:

A little later, when she was quite forgotten [ . . . ]. A little later, when as

though she had never been, it never been, she began to walk [ . . . ]. At

nightfall. [ . . . ] Slip out at nightfall and into the little church by the

north door, always locked at that hour, and walk, up and down, up and

down, his poor arm. (240)

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The church, then, is Catholic, laid out in the form of a cross, and May sees herself as pacing on the body of Christ. What she relates next is vague, but we can make out of it the signs of Rapture. But this is not Rapture in the solar sense, as a transmission of love, light, and intelligence. This is a muted form associated with lunar light:

Some nights she would halt, as one frozen by some shudder of the mind,

and stand stark still till she could move again. But many also were the

nights when she paced without pause, up and down, up and down, before

vanishing the way she came. (Pause.) No sound. (Pause.) None at least

to be heard. (Pause.) The semblance. (Pause. Resumes pacing. After two

lengths halts facing front at R. Pause.) The semblance. Faint, though by

no means invisible, in a certain light. (Pause.) Given the right light.

(Pause.) Grey rather than white, a pale shade of grey. (Pause.) Tattered.

(Pause.) A tangle of tatters. (Pause.) Watch it pass – (pause) – watch her

pass before the candelabrum, how it flames, their light . . . like moon

through passing rack. (Pause.) Soon then after she was gone, as though

never there, began to walk, up and down, up and down, that poor

arm.(240)

We should note that the stage directions require that Amy’s first utterance of the

“semblance” is isolated from the continuation of the text in both space and time: the

“semblance” hovers, not for two of May’s steps but two lengths of nine steps apiece, reminding us of how “she would halt, as one frozen by some shudder of the mind.” This

58 shudder is evocative of trauma, and as a result her language shifts more deeply into a literary mode, so that she now frames her experience from a remove, in the tone of an old-fashioned novel. The mother figure is now “Old Mrs. Winter, whom the reader will remember,” and May is now “Amy, the daughter’s given name, as the reader will remember” (240-1). She then describes a conversation between mother and daughter over supper “after worship:”

[ . . . ] fixing Amy full in the eye, she murmured, Amy, did you observe

anything . . .strange at Evensong? Amy: No, Mother, I did not. Mrs. W:

Perhaps it was just my fancy. Amy: Just what exactly, Mother, did you

perhaps fancy it was? [ . . . ] Mrs. W: You yourself observed nothing . . .

strange? Amy: No, Mother, I myself did not, to put it mildly.[ . . . ] For I

observed nothing of any kind, strange or otherwise. I saw nothing, heard

nothing, of any kind. I was not there. (241)

There are various levels of ambiguity at work in Footfalls. The time-line, for example, is imprecise. Although it is implied that May’s obsessive pacing began in childhood, we have no clue concerning at what point she declared that the carpeting was an impediment, that she must “hear the feet,” other than the mother’s stating that she was

“still little more than a child.” Also, the two seem to be talking about different things after May becomes Amy and Mother becomes Mrs. Winter. The mother is enquiring about something that happened that very evening at Sunday services, but Amy’s evasions suggest she is denying knowledge of any number of things that might have

59 happened in church, and finally stating flatly that she was not there at all. With so little else to cling to in the way of discernible events, we are left with little else besides the structure of the play to help us put its meaning together. The play seems to pivot around its mid-point, with the lengthy pause that follows May’s introduction of the

“semblance.” Associated with the semblance is the imagery of moonlight, “a pale shade of grey,” which is also tattered, a “tangle of tatters,” like “moon through passing rack,” a tattered pattern of clouds in the night sky. She is never the same after the encounter with the semblance under the light of the veiled moon: her name changes, her language changes, and she now speaks at cross purposes and with remote politeness with her mother because she has now become dissociated from her familiar self: a non-being who is “not there.” There is no language, no way for her to “put mildly” that she endured a sexual assault by a “semblance” who possibly resembled Jesus. Rapture and rape share a common Latin root, rapere, meaning to seize, or take away by force. And for Beckett and Dante alike, the moon is an unstable element in the cosmos: mutable, shadowy, mysterious, and frequently associated with rape and treachery.

In the Convivio, Dante pairs each of the seven planets – seven because he counts the Sun as a planet, and his age had no knowledge of Uranus and Pluto --with the seven branches of knowledge: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. To the moon, he assigns grammar, because of two properties:

[ . . . ] the presence in it of shadow, which is nothing other than the

occurrence of low density in the body of this star, on which the sun’s

rays cannot rest and be reflected, as they are by its other parts; the

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second is the variation in its luminosity, for it shines on different sides at

different times, depending on how the sun is facing it. Grammar has both

these properties, for, on account of the quality of infinity it possesses, the

rays of reason cannot come to rest on it, particularly in the realm of

vocabulary; and it shines from different places at different times, in that

certain words, certain declensions and certain constructions are presently

in use which previously were not, and many were previously in use

which will again be so [. . . ]. (Convivio 68)

This might strike the modern reader as somewhat forced in its reasoning, but it is typical of the scholasticism of Dante’s age, which held that creation was a system of numbers and balance. The seven deadly sins were balanced by the seven cardinal virtues. For

Dante, that there were seven planets and seven branches of knowledge was not mere coincidence. And so, as the moon possesses both light and dark patches, and waxes and wanes, so does our understanding of language shift in the course of time, usage, and other contingencies. The sun, however, he compares with arithmetic because of two different properties:

[ . . . ] the first is that it is from the Sun’s light that all the other stars

draw theirs; the other is that the eyes cannot gaze on it. These two

properties are found in Arithmetic too, for by its light all the sciences are

illuminated; since all of their subjects are to some extent studied from a

numerical perspective, and progress in the study of these subjects is

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always made with the help of numbers. [ . . . ] the second property of the

Sun is also found in number, whose science is Arithmetic: the eye of the

intellect cannot gaze on this, because number, considered in its intrinsic

nature, is infinite, and this we human beings cannot directly apprehend.

(68-69)

The sun, therefore, is consistent, and illuminates everything it touches; whereas the moon is variable, inconsistent, and “the rays of reason cannot rest on it.” And whereas today we might speak of a man in the moon, or a rabbit in the moon, people of Dante’s time saw an image of Cain, mankind’s first murderer, banished by God to the moon, with a bundle of thorns on his back. Dante refers to this image proverbially when he writes, “Cain and his bundle of thorns already is at the borders of both hemispheres”

(Inferno 20, 124-25). Beckett does the same in Malone Dies: “[ . . . ] how is it the moon where Cain toils bowed beneath its burden never sheds its light on my face?” (Three

Novels 221)

But at some time between the Convivio and the commencement of Paradiso,

Dante abandoned his theory of a moon comprised of variable densities. If the cosmos was the creation of a perfect God, then the moon had to be of a consistent substance, meaning that the light and dark spots were some trick played on the fallible human eye.

In Canto 2, he puts forward his revised theory and Beatrice, in a lengthy disquisition, provides him with the correct answer, concluding:

[ . . . ]as the soul within your dust is shared

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by different organs, each most suited to

a different potency, so does that Mind

unfold and multiply its bounty through

the varied heavens, though that intellect

itself revolves upon its unity.

With the dear body that it quickens and

with which, as life in you, it too is bound,

each different power forms a different compound.

Because of the glad nature of its source,

the power mingled with a sphere shines forth,

as gladness, through the living pupil, shines.

From this, and not from matter rare or dense,

derives the differences from light to light:

this is the formal principle, producing,

conforming with its worth, the dark, the bright. (Par. 2, 133-48)

In other words, God’s magnificence cancels all the seeming contradictions of light and dark, or dense and rare, because although different “powers” manifest themselves in different forms, they all share a single divine origin, the Mind that can

“unfold and multiply its bounty” the same way the cells in our bodies organize themselves into different organs that function in unison.

However, the logic Beatrice uses to reach this solution has been a source of consternation for Dante scholars over centuries. Entire books have been written about

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Canto 2 and the problem of the spotted moon, with some specialists contending that

Dante understood far less about astronomy than he presumed; and others saying he was firmly aligned with his age’s foremost thinkers. Beckett was baffled by the proof, and his biographer James Knowlson records him, circa 1958, still pondering it. “He spent hours, just as he had as a student in Dublin, poring over Beatrice’s explanations of the spots on the moon in the Paradiso, judging that he understood no more of it now than he had then” (Knowlson, Damned to Fame 406).

Knowlson’s “then” refers to the Samuel Beckett of some twenty-five years earlier, when Beckett approached the problem comedically in another early story about

Belacqua Shuah. “Dante and the Lobster” begins with Belacqua, the student of Italian, struggling to comprehend Canto 2 in anticipation of his lesson that afternoon:

It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti in the

moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor

forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the

spots on the moon to him. She shewed him in the first place where he

was at fault, then she put up her own explanation. She had it from God,

therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every particular. All he

had to do was to follow her step by step. Part one, the refutation, was

plain sailing. She made her point clearly, she said what she had to say

without fuss or loss of time. But part two, the demonstration, was so

dense that Belacqua could not make head or tail of it. The disproof, the

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reproof, that was patent. But then came the proof, a rapid shorthand of

the real facts, and Belacqua was bogged indeed. (MPTK 9)

Perhaps the reason for the confusion might lie in Dante having omitted some connective material in Beatrice’s demonstrations. There is also a sense that, to the modern mind, Beatrice’s elaborate proofs do not really address the questions we might have uppermost in our minds in the course of her lecture. Complete understanding might well require the reader to inhabit the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems simultaneously, and meanwhile reclaim a medieval mind-set in which astronomy and theology are still related fields. In the course of “Dante and the Lobster,” poor Belacqua remains “bogged” by the problem even unto the very end. His tutor is an older woman who invites comparison with Beatrice, given Belacqua’s near reverence for her:

His Professeressa was so charming and remarkable. Signorina Adriani

Ottolenghi! He did not believe it possible for a woman to be more

intelligent or better informed than the little Ottolenghi. So he had set her

on a pedestal in his mind, apart from other women. (16)

Later in the day, the lesson proceeds:

“You make rapid progress, she said in her ruined voice.

There subsisted as much of the Ottolenghi as might be expected

to of the person of a lady of a certain age who had found being young

and beautiful and pure more of a bore than anything else.

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Belacqua, dissembling his great pleasure, laid open the moon

enigma.

“Yes” she said “I know the passage. It is a famous teaser. Off-

hand I cannot tell you, but I will look it up when I get home.”

The sweet creature! She would look it up in her big Dante when

she got home. What a woman!

“It occurred to me” she said “apropos of I don’t know what, that

you might do worse than make up Dante’s rare moments of compassion

in Hell. That used to be” her past tenses were always sorrowful “a

favourite question.” (18-19)

Here, the Ottolenghi is referring to the instances in Inferno when Dante feels pity for some of the damned souls. Belacqua is thinking in particular of Canto 20, in which the souls of soothsayers and diviners walk with their faces twisted around to the rear of their bodies, and of a passage in which Dante employs a complex pun on “pity” and

“piety:”

He assumed an expression of profundity.

“In that connexion” he said “I recall one superb pun anyway:

‘qui vive la pieta quando e ben morta . . .’”

She said nothing.

“Is it not a great phrase?” he gushed.

She said nothing.

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“Now” he said like a fool “I wonder how you could translate

that?”

“Do you think” she murmured “it is absolutely necessary

to translate it?” (19)

Here as in “Ding—Dong,” with his confrontation with the inscrutable common woman, a mask for Beatrice, Belacqua is reduced to his default setting of embarrassment—the embarrassment shared with the youthful Dante of Vita Nuova. He had hoped to impress

Ottolenghi with his intellectual curiosity: his interest in the spots on the moon, and the linguistic intricacies surrounding Dante’s pun on pity and piety. But the Professoressa has effectively turned herself into a brick wall, first by trying to redirect his attention to a “favorite question” of previous scholars, and then by intimating that the art of translation is a null zone, and perhaps a pointless endeavor. Belacqua remains as

“bogged” as he was before, and not by one woman but by two.

“Belacqua was bogged indeed.” The passage continues: “Bored also, impatient to get on to Piccarda” (9).

He is probably eager to get on to Piccarda in Canto 3 because Piccarda’s story, in contrast to Beatrice’s disquisition, is at least straightforward, and verges on the sort of Italianate sensationalism John Webster would have exploited in a revenge tragedy.

Piccarda de’Donati was a distant relation of Dante’s wife, and the sister of two men,

Forese and Corso de’Donati, who played crucial roles both in Dante’s own life and in the Commedia. As a young woman, she took religious vows and joined the Franciscan order of St. Clare of Florence. But Corso, in need of a political alliance with one

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Rosellino della Tosa, broke into the convent with a company of soldiers, and handed her over in a forced marriage to della Tosa. Keeping her company in the moon is the soul of the Empress Constance, believed to have been likewise abducted from a convent and married off to Henry VI. The moon, Dante learns in Heaven, is the appointed destination of souls who broke their vows to God, even though it might not have been of their own volition.

Abduction takes a comic turn in Molloy. After the title character strikes down a woman’s dog with his bicycle, he follows her home and watches her bury it. Later, in her drawing-room, he is offered drinks, and falls asleep. At some unspecified later time, he awakens in a strange bed, discovers that he has been bathed, shaven, and perfumed, and wears a woman’s nightdress, “pink, transparent and adorned with ribands and frills and laces” (Three Novels 44). “If they had come and told me I was to be sacrificed at sunrise I would not have been taken aback” (38). The only source of light in the room is the full moon shining in the window:

And now its tranquil course was written on the walls, a radiance scored

with shadow, then a brief quivering of leaves, if they were leaves, then

that too went out, leaving me in the dark. How difficult it is to speak of

the moon and not lose one’s head, the witless moon. (39)

The woman intends to keep him, which is an intrinsically comic situation given the frequency with which Molloy reminds us that he is decrepit, crippled, addle-pated and

68 impotent. Eventually he steals away, but with no clear idea of how much time he eventually spent with her.

Rape, abduction, ambiguity, and questions deflected by inscrutable silence, are inextricably qualities associated with the moon, which Dante adapts and Beckett inherits. There are very few critical commentaries that posit Footfalls’ May as a victim of sexual assault. But when one takes into account the cumulative effect of moon imagery in Beckett’s writings, it is not so great a stretch to imagine May as another of those denizens alongside Piccarda and Constance, whose lives took a tragic turn from appointed courses under the spell of the “semblance.”

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CHAPTER FIVE:

DARK PARADISE

So far we have traced Beckett’s appropriations of Dante to reveal a personal and idiosyncratic response weighted heavily on imagery; on the adoption of the minor figure of Belacqua as a re-imagining of himself; on the primacy of lips and eyes as signs of the presence of the Beatrice figure and of Dante’s balcony of the soul; on brilliant penetrating light as the activation of divine love; and on the obstruction of light in the form of Typos as the signature stamped by the creator on creation. From the picture assembled at this point, we can surmise that Beckett does not serve or follow Dante; it is more of an absorption than a homage, as evidenced by the portions of the Commedia

Beckett does not touch at all: Satan, for example, and the saints Bernard, Domenic and

John, and Jesus and Mary as well. He is not particularly interested in Dante’s grand design and theology, and implies a disinterest in these features early in his career:

Dante, if he can ever be said to have failed, fails with his purely

allegorical figures, Lucifer, the Griffin of the Purgatory, and the Eagle of

the Paradise, whose significance is purely conventional and extrinsic.

Here allegory fails as it must always fail in the hands of a poet. Spenser’s

allegory collapses after a few cantos. Dante, because he was an artist and

not a minor prophet, could not prevent his allegory from becoming

heated and electrified into anagogy. (Proust 60)

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The Eagle Beckett mentions is the Eagle of Justice encountered by Dante in the heaven of Jupiter, whose eye is comprised of six stars, each one representing a king, emperor or Pope whom Dante considers an exemplar of moral government. Unless one is an extreme reactionary, there is little here to interest a modernist; and Beckett is no iconoclast in finding such a figure “purely conventional and extrinsic.” Dante was a great poet, but not everything in his age carries over smoothly into Beckett’s.

“Metaphysics has changed since Dante’s day,” as Hugh Haughton writes:

[ . . . ] and it has been Beckett’s task to create a kind of post-

metaphysical art about life after death—including the death of the

creator, the death of metaphysics, the death of the subject, and other such

dead idioms of our day. Dante, the supreme artist of the after-life, began

by providing Beckett with an unlikely model for a modern hero in

Belacqua in Antepurgatory and ended by offering Beckett a model for

the after-life of the imagination, when a time-honoured conception of

humanity was in ruins. The author of the Divina Commedia remained a

key means of access to the increasingly black comedy of the ‘divine’

itself in the wake of the Holocaust and Second World War. (Haughton

144)

Still, Dante’s pilgrim and Beckett’s vagabonds both have to end up somewhere, and the point at which they converge at least coincides with Dante’s orthodoxy in its broadest outlines with the idea that, whatever our place in the universe, we cannot think

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our way into a blessed state, because thought is inextricably tethered by language, and both are fallible, as Beckett implies in Malone Dies, with Macmann lying spread-eagle in the rain:

The idea of punishment came to his mind, addicted it is true to that

chimera and probably impressed by the posture of the body and the

fingers clenched as though in torment. And without knowing exactly

what his sin was he felt full well that living was not a sufficient

atonement for it or that this atonement was in itself a sin, and calling for

more atonement, and so on, as if there could be anything but life, for the

living. [ . . . ] And truth to tell the ideas of guilt and punishment were

confused together in his mind as those of cause and effect so often are in

the minds of those who continue to think. (Three Novels 239-40)

This is the same character mentioned in Chapter Three, who clings to the earth

“with as much energy as if he had been spread-eagled against the face of a cliff,” and thereby vertical, suggesting Jesus on the cross. The imitation of Christ figures in another late play, featuring the female character we know only as Mouth at the center of

Not I. The stage is almost entirely engulfed in darkness, with only a pin light shining on the actor’s mouth. Here we find the outlines of a spiritual journey, of a soul striving to shed herself of ego and achieve that state of ex stasis (ecstasy) which literally means standing outside of oneself.

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It begins with Mouth’s birth, then apparent abandonment by both parents, followed by a long period in which she experiences “no love of any kind . . . nothing of any note till coming up to sixty--. . . coming up to seventy . . .” until she finds herself

“wandering in a field . . . .” The pastoral imagery—“looking aimlessly for cowslips . . . to make a ball,” suggests a paradisal vision brought on by her staring into space,

“drifting around . . .” which builds to her first paroxysm: “ . . . all went out. . . all that early April morning light . . . and she found herself in the-- . . . what? . . . who? . . . no!

. . . she!” Now the veiled moon asserts itself and she becomes disoriented. A “sudden flash” occurs, and she is reminded of the “merciful . . . God” she was brought up to believe in. The mention of God is preceded by a “brief laugh” and followed by a

“[g]ood laugh” and then another “sudden flash.” Mouth’s first instinct after this flash is to believe she is undergoing some kind of punishment “for her sins,” but then she suddenly realizes, “she is not suffering.” (CSP 216-17)

Mouth now second-guesses herself: even though she is not suffering, can that mean that she is supposed to suffer? That “notion of punishment . . . was perhaps not so foolish after all.” She laughs again and experiences a third “sudden flash,” and she is back in the pasture again, under the influence of the “shrouded” moon. It is as if the two notions of not suffering and deserving to suffer have cancelled each other out. But with the fourth “sudden flash” she sees herself imitating the sufferings of Christ, and failing at it:

Sudden flash . . . very foolish really but so like her. . . in a way . . . that

she might do well to . . . groan . . . on and off . . . writhe she could not

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. . . as if in actual agony . . . but could not . . . could not bring

herself . . . some flaw in her make-up . . . incapable of deceit . . . (217)

And now she feels inhabited by “a voice she did not recognize . . . at first,” but which she realizes is really hers after all. But having had speech restored to her, she second- guesses herself again. Now that speech is possible, it is “not felt at all . . . so intent one is . . . of what one is saying.” Saying rather than actually experiencing might be the distinction she is trying to make here. After recounting some other fragmentary memories, she is back in the pasture, under the influence of “moonbeam,” and “God is love . . . she’ll be purged . . . back in the field . . . morning sun . . . April . . . sink face down in the grass . . . nothing but the larks” (221). The introduction of this new idea, that she will be “purged,” leads to the language of confession:

. . . and the beam . . . ferreting around . . . painless . . . so far . . . ha! . . .

so far . . . then thinking . . . oh long after . . . sudden flash . . . perhaps

something she had to . . . had to . . . tell . . . something she had to . . .

tell. (221)

In the final moments, Mouth repeats some things she has already told us, and introduces new episodes, such as “that time in court . . . what she had to say for herself . . . guilty or not guilty . . . ,” and the time she was incoherent in a public lavatory and “no one could follow . . . till she saw the stare she was getting . . . then die of shame . . .” (222).

An overall shape in her narrative gradually emerges, with moments of shame and

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judgment interspersed with the sudden flash, which always returns her to the pasture, and on each visit the pastoral experience takes on more detail. In its second to last appearance, she tells us she is “ . . . then forgiven . . . God is love . . . tender mercies . . . new every morning . . . back in the field . . . April morning . . . face in the grass . . . nothing but the larks . . . pick it up there . . . get on with it from there” (222).

In this particular variation, the addition of “pick it up there” signals Mouth’s desire to resume her story with the pasture as its culmination, but something is preventing her: “. . . Get on with it from there . . . nothing she could tell? . . . try something else . . . think of something else . . . oh long after . . . sudden flash . . . not that either . . . .” The narrative—which we realize now she is unable to control—drags her back to her beginning again as a “tiny little thing.” And although her final audible words find her “back in the field” where “God is love . . . April morning . . . face in the grass . . .nothing but the larks . . .” the curtain is already descending, and she continues,

“unintelligible,” for ten seconds after its fall. (223)

Not I had its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1973.According to Knowlson, critics “spoke of the hypnotic, almost hallucinatory effect of watching

Mouth,” and of how the “text came through with searing power as a harsh shriek of anguish, all the more potent because it demanded total concentration for the spectator to catch the words” (Knowlson 529). Although she was stationary, the actress Billie

Whitelaw recalls how “ . . . a lot of people thought that I was pacing up and down, that the mouth was moving. It’s like looking at a star; after a while it seems to be moving about” (Ben-Zvi, Women in Beckett 9).

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Whitelaw’s stellar simile is probably accidental, but it reinforces the illusion of a single lighted Mouth floating in a cavernous darkness. Supporting the illusion of dismemberment and perceived motion is Beckett’s stage direction that Mouth is “about

8 feet above stage level” (CSP 215), or just high enough for the spectator to disassociate

Mouth from an actual human standing onstage. This bears a close resemblance to the staging of Beckett’s That Time, premiering three years later in the same theatre, in which the Listener’s face is “about 10 feet above stage level” (227), and, like Mouth, surrounded by darkness. In this play, Listener is called upon by the playwright only to open and close his eyes at specified times while he listens to three different versions of himself reminiscing, and then at the conclusion, leave the audience with a smile,

“toothless for preference” (234). The isolation, then elevation of lips and eyes onstage is reminiscent of Dante’s language in the Convivio about how these features form the balcony of the soul.

The Listener’s smile might come as a surprise to spectators, given that the memories his separate selves relate are somewhat desultory or incomplete, and nothing in the narrative points particularly to a happy outcome. In this culminating moment the

Listener is probably dying or already dead. A toothless smile suggests both old and infancy, so that we are allowed to imagine the Listener is completing a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

The smile becomes a grace note of affirmation in Beckett’s late work. We have already noted how Beatrice’s smile and radiant expression actually powers Dante’s ascent up to the Empyrean. In the higher reaches, this gesture is finally universalized so that Dante tells us how “I seemed to see all of the universe turn to a smile” (27, 4-5). So

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too does Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said climax with what we might call the appearance of a universal smile. But in Beckett’s handling, it is more of a dark devouring maw which finally extinguishes the nameless old woman who is its central character: “First last moment. Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment . . . Not another crumb of carrion left” (Nohow on 86). But that is the end of the story. To appreciate how Beckett inverts Dante’s brilliant smiling universe into an all-consuming mouth we must pace ourselves more deliberately and begin at the beginning, with

Beckett’s title.

As with other long poems, both classical and medieval, Dante begins Paradiso with an invocation to his muse Apollo, in order to grant him the powers necessary to describe his overwhelming journey, for he has “seen such things that no man, once returned / from them, has wit or skill to tell about” (1,4-6). This sentiment, that the poet, being a mere mortal, will never be equal to the task at hand, refrains throughout the poem, even towards the climax when he confesses that “[a]t this point I admit to my defeat: / no poet, comic or tragic, ever was / more outdone by this theme than I am now” (30, 22-4). “Ill seen, ill said,” therefore can be read as Beckett’s own terse and sardonic expression of the same sentiment, stripped of its lofty rhetoric, and contracted into—Beckett’s coinage—a “collapsion” (83). The witness who observes the old woman is nameless, and, like other Beckett characters, never says “I.” The narrative proceeds haltingly, and resembles the laborious crawling of “you” in the companion piece, Company. Almost every new element he introduces and attempts to describe, such as the woman’s cabin, is instantly braked by the self-admonishment of “Careful,” because at any point the “wrong word” threatens to intrude (50 and passim). In the

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ethereal realm in which the woman abides, distinctions break down, and what is real and what is not seems an insurmountable riddle:

Such the confusion between real and—how say its contrary? No matter.

That old tandem. Such now the confusion between them once so

twain . . . No matter now. Such equal liars both. Real and—how say its

contrary? The counter-poison. (72)

There are also intimations that the world she inhabits is in perpetual twilight—either that, or the eye that perceives her is failing. “It is evening. It will always be evening.

When not night.” (61).

One evening she was followed by a lamb [ . . . ] rather than walk it seems

to glide like a toy in tow. It halts at the same instant as she. At the same

instant as she strays on. Stockstill as she it waits with head like hers

extravagantly bowed. (70)

With amazing economy Beckett alludes to a nursery rhyme, a child’s pull-toy, heads bowed in unison as if praying, and a harmonic attraction that makes the movements of woman and lamb synchronous. A similar harmony is observed with the woman eating:

At last in a twin movement full of grace she slowly raises the bowl

toward her lips while at the same time with equal slowness bowing her

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head to join it. Having set out at the same instant they meet halfway and

there come to rest. (69)

She is a magnet that attracts the symbol of purity, a lamb, and in harmony with it; she is childlike, meaning her innocence is restored; and she takes sustenance in motions “full of grace,” suggesting communion. In this way, Beckett is telling us, she is ready “to melt into paradise” (64).

In the process of “melting,” her typological presence is fading: “[ . . . ] little by little her footprints are effaced” (55), and “[ . . . ] snow has ceased. Her steps so light they barely leave a trace” (68). Meanwhile, our notions of dark and light are confounded, with “[n]othing left but black sky. White earth. Or inversely” (66). As a measure of this inversion, the color of white, normally associated with light and purity, now seems to represent decay and death:

White stones more plentiful every year. As well say every instant. In a

fair way if they persist to bury all [. . . ]. Of striking effect in the light of

the moon these millions of little sepulchers [ . . . ]. Leprous with white

scars where the grass has receded from the chalky soil [ . . . ].

Everywhere every instant whiteness is gaining .(62-63)

In another instance of inversion, light is now perceived as “treacherous” (78), and the witness seems to take comfort in the enveloping dark, reminding us again of how it

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“will always be evening. Always winter. When not night” (76). In the “light of the last rays,” the witness now perceives the old woman’s smile:

A smile? Is it possible? Ghost of an ancient smile smiled finally once

and for all. Such ill half seen the mouth in the light of the last rays.

Suddenly they leave it. Rather it leaves them. Off again to the dark.

There to smile on. If smile is what it is [ . . . ]. Eyes closed in the dark.

To the dark. In their own dark. On the lips same minute smile. (79-80)

This leads to the culmination, in which the old woman is finally absorbed by the void.

“Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness” (86).

T o end knowing happiness accords with Dante’s intention for his Commedia:

“to remove those living in this life from the state of misery to the state of felicity.”

Beckett adds a similar Dantean grace note in Company, which precedes Ill Seen Ill Said by one year. After decades of serving as a motif for hopelessness in Beckett’s prose,

Belacqua has finally climbed the mount of Purgatory and gone beyond it—or at least such a progression is implied in the words, “[s]o sat waiting to be purged the old lutist cause of Dante’s first quarter-smile and now perhaps singing praises with some section of the blest at last” (Nohow On 44).

At first glance, it is difficult to imagine two artists more differently attuned than

Dante and Beckett. The former created a poem of vast size, encyclopedic in its scope, encompassing the entirety of Western thought as it was then known: its religion,

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history, science, and prophecy, in a structure which rivals in its intricacy the cathedrals of his age. The latter turned his attentions to the tramps, the lost and dispossessed, in brief and dimly-lit plays, showing these souls either trapped under withering shards of light or plunged in pools of darkness. For Dante, light and dark remain stark opposites.

But in Beckett’s hands, they become ductile materials, and the divine light of Dante’s heaven can become either merciless or benign, and it has a sister in the pernicious moon which dazzles or entraps the lost soul of Footfalls, and the holy fool of Not I. And in Ill

Seen Ill Said, their values are reversed, allowing Beckett to create his own personal

Dark Paradise.

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--- . Paradiso. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Los Angeles: University of California Press,

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--- . Paradise. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.

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