BELACQUA'S SHADOWS IN DREAM OF FAIR TO MIDDLING WOMEN AND HOW IT IS

Daniela Caselli

This article focuses on Belacqua in Dream of Fair to Middling Women and How It Is. I look at how these texts produce different 'Belacquas'; strategies through which "Mr Beckett" fashions himself within this text as the 'aµthor'; and at the role of Belacqua's shadows in How It Is. I explore how Belacqua works as tex• tual memory, problematising notions of origin, source, and repetition. I further argue that the intratextual production of Belacqua is one important strategy through which Beckett's a:uvre produces itself as such.

This paper investigates four passages from Dream of Fair to Middling Women and How It Is to elucidate Belacqua's functions in these texts. Based on my analysis of these sections, I maintain that the intratextual production of Belacqua is one significant strategy through which Beckett's oeuvre constitutes itself as such. I examine how these two novels produce within themselves a specifically labelled 'other' that works 'as' other, looking at how Belacqua is configured as 'source', 'quotation', 'allusion', 'model to be parodied'. These textual strategies at once shape the conventional presuppositions on which they rest and deconstruct them.

1. Belacqua in Dream ofFair to Middling Women Belacqua in Dream mediates issues of authority and control. The narrator asserts that "There is no real Belacqua, it is to be hoped not indeed, there is no such person" (122), a claim that is reflected in the textual multiplic• ity of 'Belacquas'. The second chapter of Dream not only blends Bel into Dante's Belacqua, as described in Purgatorio IV, but also foregrounds the novel's layered fictionality through the use of the two fourteenth- and fifteenth-century commentaries on the Comedy: the Comentum of Ben• venuto de Rambaldis de Imola (ca. 1375) and the commentary of the Anonimo Fiorentino (ca. 1400), both reproduced under the entry 'Belac• qua' in Toynbee's Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante. 1 The characterisation of Belacqua as a lute-maker is to be encountered not in the Comedy but in these commentaries, which

461 interestingly adopt the genre of the novella to elaborate on the brief appa• rition of the crouched, slothful shade in Dante's Antepurgatory. The fre• quent critical confusion between the text of the Comedy and its com• mentaries duplicates Dream's destabilisation of the boundaries between the two; Dante's Belacqua merges into Benvenuto's and the Anonimo's, and all participate in a non-hierarchical fashion to shape the unstable protagonist of Dream. Through Belacqua the fictionality inherent in the exegetical writings and the non-originality of creative writing are fore• grounded and coalesced. After stating that Belacqua "at his simplest [ ... ] was trine" ( 120), Dream separates Belacqua's "sloth" (121) and "native indolence" (122) from "the dreary fiasco of oscillation that presents itself as the only alter• native" ( 121 ). The latter consists of "squatting in the heart of his store, sculpting with great care and chiselling the heads and necks of lutes and zithers, or sustaining in the doorways the girds of eminent poets, or coming out into the street for a bit of song and dance (aliquando etiam pulsabat)" (121-22). A slothful Belacqua whose "native indolence" refers to the Comedy is contrasted with a rather more active "cellineggia[ nte ]" Belacqua (122) linked to Benvenuto and the Anonimo. Thus Belacqua, described by the Anonimo as "artefice" (qtd. in Toynbee, 74), fore• grounds the 'artificiality' of the commentaries, which do not simply 'describe' a slothful character but "inscribe" his sloth "with frivolous spirals" (121 ). No original simplicity, however, is opposed to such artifi• ciality: "there is no authority for supposing that this third Belacqua is the real Belacqua" ( 121 ). The text of Dream comments on. its own recycling of textual personae as a necessarily non-original form of writing, as indi• cated by the lack of 'freedom' that constantly characterises Belacqua. This proliferation of 'sources', moreover, blended into one another, mir• rors, on an intertextual level, the instability asserted in the statement, "there is no real Belacqua [ ... ]there is no such person" (122). The third• person pronoun works as a conventional device; the name of the charac• ter can grant neither unity nor originality but is exposed in its multiple textuality. It is also in relation to Belacqua that "Mr Beckett" fashions himself within the text as the author, at once questioning and evoking the teleological and authorial implications of narrative. At the end of Dream's chapter "UNO", in the manner of the later Company (7), "a voice comes to one in the dark", speaking the words "L'andar su che porta?" (141). Just as Dante - the character - first hears a voice and only later can identify Belacqua as the speaker of the words, "[ ... ] Forse I che

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