Beckett's Dantes

Intertextuality in the fiction and criticism

Daniela Caselli

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719071577
  9780719071560
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847796301
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: Literature

Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism is the first study in English on the literary relation between Beckett and Dante. It is an innovative reading of Samuel Beckett and Dante's works and a critical engagement with contemporary theories of intertextuality. It is an informative intertextual reading of Beckett's work, detecting previously unknown quotations, allusions to, and parodies of Dante in Beckett's fiction and criticism. The volume interprets Dante in the original Italian (as it appears in Beckett), translating into English all Italian quotations. It benefits from a multilingual approach based on Beckett's published works in English and French, and on manuscripts (which use English, French, German and Italian). Through a close reading of Beckett's fiction and criticism, the book will argue that Dante is both assumed as an external source of literary and cultural authority in Beckett's work, and also participates in Beckett's texts' sceptical undermining of authority. Moreover, the book demonstrates that the many references to various 'Dantes' produce 'Mr Beckett' as the figure of the author responsible for such a remarkably interconnected oeuvre. The book is aimed at the scholarly communities interested in literatures in English, literary and critical theory, comparative literature and theory, French literature and theory and Italian studies. Its jargon-free style will also attract third-year or advanced undergraduate students, and postgraduate students, as well as those readers interested in the unusual relationship between one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and the medieval author who stands for the very idea of the Western canon.

1 Dantes in Limbo

Detecting Dante in Joyce

The early Beckett essay ‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce’, was written in 1929 at Joyce’s suggestion about the debt of Work in Progress to Dante, Bruno, and Vico.¹ The essay opens by claiming that ‘the danger is in the neatness of identifications’; such ‘neatness’ can reduce the comparison to ‘a carefully folded hamsandwich’, an act of ‘pigeon-holing’ or of ‘book-keeping’ (19). Rather than limiting the analysis to the passages where ‘explicit illustration’ of one text within another can be found, the essay privileges what it calls ‘reverberations’ or ‘reapplications’. The not-so-easily ‘visible’ literary contaminations are juxtaposed with ‘the stiff interexclusiveness that is often the danger in neat construction’ (22). Although presence and visibility are usually regarded as problems within the Beckett oeuvre, in this text they are asserted rather than probed, with the purpose of grounding Joyce’s authority.

Bruno and Vico serve the argument of Joyce’s linguistic experimentalism that will be the basis for the discussion of what Rough for Radio II will call, tongue-in-cheek, ‘the divine Florentine’. Dante is introduced flippantly, in the third and last section of the essay:

To justify our title, we must move North, ‘Sovra’l bel fiume d’Arno alla gran villa’…. Between ‘colui per lo cui verso – il meonio cantor non è più solo’ and the ‘still to-day insufficiently malestimated notesnatcher, Shem the Penman’, there exists considerable circumstantial similarity. (30)

The two quotations are from the Comedy (Inf. XXIII, 95) and from Leopardi’s Sopra il monumento di Dante che si preparava in Firenze, respectively.² The latter is a poem which describes Dante as the only poet capable of reaching Homer’s perfection, while the quotation from the Comedy is a self-description of Dante replying to Catalano dei Malvolti and Loderingo degli Andalò in the sixth section of Malebolge. To the two hypocrites who ask him about his identity, Dante replies: ‘I’ fui nato e cresciuto / sovra ’l bel fiume d’Arno a la gran villa, / e son col corpo ch’i’ ho sempre avuto’ (I was born and grew up on the fair stream of Arno, at the great town, and I am in the body that I have always had) (Inf. XXIII, 94–95).³ The quotation on Dante’s origins ‘justifies’ the geographical movement from Vico and Bruno’s Naples to Florence and is associated with the Leopardi poem, which creates a mise en abyme. Just as in Leopardi the comparison between Homer and Dante guarantees Dante’s poetic excellence, in Beckett Dante is proof of Joyce’s artistic importance. The basis for such a relationship of authority between Dante and Joyce (their ‘circumstantial similarity’) is their common linguistic innovation, as ‘they both saw how worn out and threadbare was the conventional language of cunning literary artificers, both rejected an approximation to a universal language’ (30).

The essay fashions a modernist Dante; but, if a number of twentieth-century writers have seen Dante’s modernism in the multilingualism of the Comedy, the ability to transform ‘the poetical problem into a linguistic question’, and the innumerable variations of register within the unity of tone, the argument developed by the essay rests mainly on the assumption that Dante’s language is ‘synthetic’.⁴ While the Comedy is the text which sustains most twentieth-century theories supporting a modernist Dante, ‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce’ argues in favour of the similarity between Dante’s and Joyce’s linguistic experimentation mostly through quotations from De vulgari eloquentia and the Convivio.

Beckett’s essay concentrates on the way in which the vernacular was theorised by Dante, and it contends that this new language broke the literary conventions of its time, thus causing the public’s moral and aesthetic disapproval. The view that ‘the De vulgari eloquentia postulated the need for an artificial, “synthetic” language – a refined and immutable version of the common language – was one of the predominant interpretations at the time of Beckett’s essay, although several critics would dispute it’.⁵ The ongoing debates about the theories illustrated in the Latin prose of De vulgari eloquentia and in the vernacular of the Convivio point to the fact that the two texts exhibit not only remarkable philosophical complexity but also a number of paradoxical and contradictory arguments. These paradoxes and contradictions are structured, according to Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, as an attempt to give an inaugural ‘formal’ existence to a linguistic reality as ‘in progress’.⁶

The rhetoric of the essay aims to demonstrate how the idea of Dante as the quintessentially classic author has developed over time, whereas his art was initially perceived as far too daring an experiment. Joyce’s language, the text argues, is an artificial construction which can paradoxically ‘desophisticate’ language through the unity of form and content. Dante’s language is correspondingly described as a similarly ‘artificial’ product, the result of a synthetic operation of skimming the best parts from a number of dialects (a theory which had been denounced as ‘false’ by Vico).⁷ The reaction against the conventionality of a worn-out language – Latin in Dante’s case, English in Joyce’s – is for Beckett a common characteristic of the two authors, both free from narrow national or regional prejudices.

In order to bolster his argument, Beckett quotes excerpts from De vulgari eloquentia in which Dante expresses his contempt for anyone who thinks his own town the most delightful place, and who likes his own dialect better than any other:

Nam quicumque tam obscenae rationis est, ut locum suae nationis delitosissimum credat esse sub sole, huic etiam proe cunctis propriam volgare licetur, idest maternam locutionem. Nos autem, cui mundus est patria … etc.’ When he comes to examine the dialects he finds Tuscan: ‘turpissium … fere omnes Tusci in suo turpiloquio obtusi … non restat in dubio quin aliud sit vulgare quod quaerimus quam quod attingit populus Tuscanorum. (30)

The passage illustrates Dante’s indignation with anyone who gives primacy to his own narrow reality. Yet, in De vulgari the passage in which Dante describes himself as someone ‘for whom the world is fatherland as the sea is for fish’ is followed by the declaration of his affection for Florence and the discussion differentiates between choosing the world as motherland and being forced to do so because one is exiled.⁸ In order to connect Dante’s openmindedness with his linguistic multidialectal operation, Beckett’s quotation seems to refer only to the vernacular of Florence, but has in fact two different referents in De vulgari. The adjective ‘turpissimus’ is from chapter eleven of book one of De vulgari and refers to the vernacular of Rome, while the rest of the sentence comes from chapter thirteen. Although the omissions are indicated, they are misleading; once contextualised, Dante’s assertion has very different implications. In chapter ten Dante describes every vernacular found in Italy, in order to exclude them all because none of them can be regarded as vulgare illustre. He starts from those furthest away from ‘the panther whose smell is everywhere and which is nowhere visible’ (I.xvi, 1); the first vulgare discussed in chapter eleven, the vernacular of Rome, does not even deserve that name, since it is a ‘tristiloquium’ (a noun used in I.xv, 7 for the vernaculars of Trento, Turin, and Alessandria too).⁹ The vivid Dantean adjective ‘turpissimus’ is quoted (conjugated) in the Beckett text as if it referred to the Tuscan vernacular, whereas De vulgari is remarkably less harsh towards the dialect of Tuscany, which is nevertheless also judged as profoundly different from the vulgare illustre, as made clear by Dante’s criticism of Guittone d’Arezzo’s vernacular, regarded in chapter thirteen as merely municipal. The passage from which Beckett quotes reads:

Sed quanquam fere omnes Tusci in suo turpiloquio sint obtusi, nonnullos vulgaris excellentiam cognovisse sentimus, scilicet Guidonen, Lapum et unum alium, Florentinos, et Cynum Pistoriensem, quem nunc indigne postponimus, non indigne coacti. Itaque si tuscanas examinemus loquelas, et pensemus, qualiter viri prehonorati a propria diverterunt, non restat in dubio quin aliud sit vulgare quod querimus, quam quod actingit populus Tuscanorum. (I.xiii, 4–5)

But although almost all Tuscans have been deafened by their own wretched speech, I feel that some have understood excellence in the vernacular, to wit Guido, Lapo, and one other Florentine, and Cino of Pistoia, whom now, not unfittingly constrained, I unfittingly put last. And so if we examine the Tuscan vernacular and consider how men of the greatest fame have abandoned their own, there can be no doubt that the vernacular which I seek is other than that of which the people of Tuscany make use. (73)

The Tuscan vernacular cannot be the vulgare illustre precisely because the poets who come closest to the excellence of vernacular eloquence (among them Dante himself) have departed from it. In other words, De vulgari eloquentia tries to justify theoretically what in the text is presented as a contemporary poetic phenomenon, constituted by Dante’s own previous poetic experiences – both the Stilnovistic and the moral – and by those of other poets, especially Cino of Pistoia and Guido Cavalcanti, the latter still regarded as a model vernacular poet, an attitude which will change in the Comedy. De vulgari wants to create the national project of the vulgare illustre; hence the paradoxical adoption of Latin, to give to the new vulgare illustre – a language defined in the first book as ‘nobilior’ than Latin – a rhetorical and poetical frame.

Thus, up to chapter fifteen of the first book of the De vulgari, vulgare latium indicates the sum of the different and dissonant dialects of the peninsula, none of which can be regarded as the vulgare illustre. However, from chapter fifteen to nineteen vulgare latium is designated as such by the ‘doctores illustres qui lingua vulgari poetati sunt’ (I.xix, 1). As Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo puts it: ‘the theoretical construction of the illustrious vernacular lies between these two different meanings of the “vulgare latium”’.¹⁰ While demonstrating in detail how none of the dialects spoken in any region of Italy corresponds to the illustrious vernacular, Dante also extensively describes a substantially unitary language, of the doctores illustres: that is to say the poets who write or have written in a non-municipal vernacular.¹¹ He insists on the differences among the municipal vernaculars just as much as he stresses the unity of this literary language. According to Mengaldo, this unity results not from the selection of the purest elements of all the different vernaculars but instead from the rational impetus towards the ‘reductio ad unum’, that is to say a metaphysical simplification.¹²

‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce’ highlights a theoretical tension in Dante’s text. The poets mentioned in the passage quoted above are said to have moved away from the popular municipal vernaculars and at the same time to recognise the poetic excellence of the vernacular. They work in the text as actual examples and yet they are transformed into an abstract entity, summed into the divine number one, the ‘simplicissima quantitas’ by which the local vernaculars will be measured. Lucia Boldrini has maintained that such singular, perfect entity ‘does not appear anywhere in particular but is reflected in all the particular vernaculars and reflects them in itself (I.xvi, 5). The vulgare illustre is qualified therefore as the optimum of vernaculars’; unlike Mengaldo, Boldrini interprets the opposition between omnis and nullius at the end of chapter sixteen as an indication that ‘the task of the poet is to “(re)compose” [the illustrious vernacular], starting from the multiplicity of the local vernaculars and selecting from them what best reflects the perfection of the “one” – that is to say, extracting the noblest elements and reconstituting them in the vulgare illustre’.¹³ Boldrini’s Dante, the ‘self-fashioned redeemer of the felix culpa of Babel’ and absolute innovator, is in line with Beckett’s – and even more with Joyce’s – formulation of Dante’s language as ‘synthetic’, distilled out of the ‘purest elements from each dialect’.¹⁴ While Boldrini interprets the idea of ‘the optimum of vernaculars’ as a process of synthesis and selection, one could argue, with Mengaldo, that the text does not indicate such modalities as the method followed to ‘invent’ the illustrious vernacular. Rather, the poetic examples in the De vulgari shape a de facto reality to which the Latin text gives a de jure consistency.

The notion of a Dantean ‘synthetic language’ creates further problems in relation to the neat contrast between this new language and Latin suggested by Beckett. Although Dante in De vulgari reacts against the ‘conventionality’ of Latin, he also adopts it, ‘helped by his belief in the continuity between Latin and the vernacular, which enables him to incorporate any kind of tradition while he is getting ready for any kind of innovation’.¹⁵ Dante’s Latin in this text is very sophisticated and has numerous cultural ech...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Dantes in Limbo
• 2 Belacqua does not observe ‘the rule of the road’
• 3 Strata and mysteries: intratextuality in More Pricks Than Kicks
• 4 Fatigue and disgust: Murphy and Watt
• 5 Who is the third beside you? Authority in Mercier and Camier
• 6 Déjà vu beyond reach: from the Novellas to the Three Novels
• 7 Staging the Inferno in How It Is
• 8 ‘In the words of the poet’: The Lost Ones
• Conclusion: farewell to the old lutist
• Bibliography
• Index