THE MAGIC TRIANGLE: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Arno Schmidt

Friedhelm Rathjen

Beckett's work looks entirely different from Joyce's, but this very dissimilarity is the result of Beckett's connection to Joyce. The dynamics at play here can be understood by applying Giordano Bruno's principle of the identity of opposites and further illustrated by comparing Beckett's reactions to Joyce to that of the German novelist Amo Schmidt. The main question is: why does Beckett, under• standing and admiring Joyce's aims and instruments so well, tum away from Joyce's work, while Schmidt, misreading fundamental principles of Joyce's work and disliking some of its vital features, turns more and more towards Joyce? There are similarities between Beckett and Schmidt, too, but these have scarcely anything to do with the Joycean impact.

In his famous German letter of 193 7, Beckett sets his own concept of a "literature of the unword" against Joyce's "apotheosis of the word". Beckett declares that Joyce's position has nothing to do with his own, "[ u ]nless perhaps Ascension to Heaven and Descent to Hell are somehow one and the same" (1983b, 173, 172). Beckett discussed just such an identity of opposites in the earlier "Dante ... Bruno.Vico . .Joyce", in which he sums up Bruno's principle as follows: "The maxima and minima of particular contraries are one and indifferent. [ ... ] The maximum of cor• ruption and the minimum of generation are identical: in principle, cor• ruption is generation" (1983b, 21). At least metaphorically, Bruno's prin• ciple can be said to fit the Joyce-Beckett relationship: The maximum of Beckett and the minimum of Joyce are identical: in principle, Beckett is Joyce. 1 I believe that we do not have to limit such an identification to the metaphorical level. Beckett's work looks entirely different from Joyce's, but this very dissimilarity is the result of the reciprocal relation between the authors: wherever Joyce made a major impact there is a correspond• ing blank in Beckett's work. In order to avoid becoming a second-hand replica of Joyce, Beckett had first to admit that Joyce had already reached the end of his own course and, secondly, to decide to head in the opposite direction. Beckett's course, then, was the outcome of his anxiety of being

92 identified with Joyce: the radicalism of Joyce's stepping in the one direc• tion caused the radicalism of Beckett's stepping in the other. There is then good reason to agree with David Hayman's contention that, "The question of Beckett in relation to Joyce could be a fine test case for Harold Bloom's theory about the anxiety of influence and creative mis• reading" (Hayman, 3 7). In order to illustrate my argument I would like to compare Beckett's reactions to Joyce to those of the German novelist Amo Schmidt. Born in 1914, Schmidt did not read Joyce until 1956 when he was nearly forty• three years old. Subsequently, both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake had considerable influence on Schmidt's prose and artistic theory; indeed, he wrote several essays on Joyce, and Schmidt's own works of the sixties are studded with Joycean quotations, allusions and puns. At the same time, the various distortions that are apparent in Schmidt's comments on or allusions to Joyce clearly show that he is trying to keep the older author at a distance. These distortions, although deliberate, nevertheless reveal a remarkable lack of understanding of Joyce's accomplishments in Finnegans Wake. Amo Schmidt in relation to Joyce is one of the best possible examples for Bloom's "creative misreading" process. When Amo Schmidt's first books were published in the early fifties, some critics found Schmidt to be a writer mimicking Joyce's techniques and mannerisms. The truth was that Schmidt had never read Joyce and had instead invented his own modernism, so to speak. When Schmidt finally read Ulysses, he hastened to declare that Joyce was a great man but that he found no similarity whatsoever between their two works. Although afraid of losing his independence vis-a-vis Joyce, Schmidt was so impressed that in his text "Caliban upon Setebos" (1963) he remod• elled the old myth of Orpheus in a way quite similar to Joyce's transfor• mation of Homer's Odyssey in Ulysses. A good example of Schmidt's "creative misreading" based on his "anxiety of influence" is his reaction to his publisher's attempt to interest him in Finnegans Wake. When in 1957, he received a copy of Joyce's famous novel from his publisher, Schmidt tried to reject the book because it would divert him from his own work. Schmidt indeed resisted the temptation offered by Finnegans Wake for years, and when he finally read it, he was fascinated and frustrated at the same time: fascinated, because the techniques of creative misspelling invented by Joyce offered Schmidt something that he had been looking for in his own work, and frustrated, because Schmidt's first impression seems to have been that Joyce had already achieved long ago what Schmidt was still struggling to

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