All Sturm and no Drang. Beckett and Romanticism. Beckett at Reading

  “All Sturm and no Drang” Beckett and Romanticism

  Beckett at Reading 2006 Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 18 An Annual Bilingual Review Revue Annuelle Bilingue EDITORS: : Marius Buning and Sjef Houppermans (The Netherlands) Chief Editors

  : Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts, Sjef Houppermans Editorial Board

(The Netherlands), Dirk Van Hulle (Belgium), Angela Moorjani (USA) and

Danièle de Ruyter (The Netherlands)

  : Enoch Brater (USA), Mary Bryden (UK), Lance Butler Advisory Board (France), Keir Elam (Italy), Stan E. Gontarski (USA), Onno Kosters (The

Netherlands), John Pilling (UK), Jean-Michel Rabaté (USA) and Dominique

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“All Sturm and no Drang”

Beckett and Romanticism

  

Beckett at Reading 2006

Edited by

  

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Beckett and Romanticism

  1. Dirk Van Hulle “Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism and “the Modern Prometheus”

  15

  2. Paul Lawley Failure and Tradition: Coleridge / Beckett

  31

  3. Elizabeth Barry The Long View: Beckett, Johnson, Wordsworth and the Language of Epitaphs

  47

  4. Mark Nixon Beckett and Romanticism in the 1930s

  61

  5. Chris Ackerley Samuel Beckett and Anthropomorphic Insolence

  77

  6. Franz Michael Maier Two Versions of Nacht und Träume: What Franz Schubert Tells Us about a Favourite Song of Beckett

  91

  7. John Bolin The “irrational heart”: Romantic Disillusionment in Murphy and The Sorrows of Young Werther 101

  8. Andrew Eastham Beckett’s Sublime Ironies: The Trilogy, Krapp’s Last Tape, and the Remainders of Romanticism 117

  9. Michael Angelo Rodriguez Romantic Agony: Fancy and Imagination in Samuel Beckett’s All Strange Away 131

  Table of Contents

  Beckett at Reading 2006

  10. María José Carrera “En un lugar della mancha”: Samuel Beckett’s Reading of Don Quijote in the Whoroscope Notebook 145

  11. Friedhelm Rathjen Neitherways: Long Ways in Beckett’s Shorts 161

  12. John Pilling

  From an Abandoned Work

  : “all the variants of the one” 173

  13. Anthony Cordingley Beckett and “l’ordre naturel”: The Universal Grammar of Comment c'est/How It Is 185

  14. Marion Fries-Dieckmann Beckett and the German Language: Text and Image 201

  15. Rónán McDonald “What a male!”: Triangularity, Desire and Precedence in “Before Play” and Play 213

  16. Sean Lawlor “Alba” and “Dortmunder”: Signposting Paradise and the Balls-aching World 227

  17. David A. Hatch Samuel Beckett’s “Che Sciagura” and the Subversion of Irish Moral Convention 241

  18. Paul Stewart A Rump Sexuality: The Recurrence of Defecating Horses in Beckett’s Oeuvre 257

  19. Gregory Byala

  Murphy

  , Order, Chaos 271

  Table of Contents

  20. Maximilian de Gaynesford Knowing How To Go On Ending 285

  21. Karine Germoni The Theatre of Le Dépeupleur 297

  22. Dirk Van Hulle / Mark Nixon “Holo and unholo”: The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project 313

  Free Space

  23. Jackie Blackman Beckett Judaizing Beckett: “a Jew from Greenland” in Paris 325

  24. Russell Smith “The acute and increasing anxiety of the relation itself”: Beckett, the Author-Function, and the Ethics of Enunciation 341

  25. Thomas J. Cousineau Demented vs. Creative Emulation in Murphy 355

  26. Sjef Houppermans Falling Down and Standing Up and Falling Down Again… 367

  27. Carla Taban

  Molloy

  : de ‘jeux de mots’ aux modalités po(ï)étiques de configuration textuelle 377

  28. Guillaume Gesvret Posture de la prière, écriture de la précarité (Mal vu mal dit, Cap au pire et ...que nuages...) 393

  29. Anne Cousseau Rencontre de Charles Juliet avec Samuel Beckett: “Cette parole nue qui vient de la souffrance” 407

  Notes on Contributors 425

INTRODUCTION

  No matter how tongue-in-cheek Beckett’s references to Romanticism sometimes are, they keep recurring with a remarkable persistence throughout his work. The “blue flower,” one of the key symbols of Romantic yearning for unreachable horizons, is already present in Beckett’s personal Sturm und Drang piece, his first published story “Assumption.” Later on, the Blaue Blume appears as the “blue bloom” in “A Wet Night,” alluding to Leopold Bloom’s activities in the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses. To what extent Romanticism plays a role in Beckett’s developing poetics and his positioning vis-à-vis his great examples Joyce and Proust is a fascinating, because difficult, question. In his essay on the latter’s work, Beckett discerns a “romantic strain in Proust,” a “retrogressive tendency,” receding from the Symbolists back towards Victor Hugo.

  Although the blue flower seems to have withered after its reappearance in Watt, the impossible yearning it stands for never completely disappeared, from his early notes on Beethoven’s An die

  

ferne Geliebte (in the Dream Notebook) to the “missing word”

  (Stirrings Still) “afaint afar away” (what is the word). The entry on “Romanticism” in the Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett points out, with reference to Molloy:

  His condition is essentially that of SB himself, mockery qualified by an undercurrent of German Romanticism, in literature (Hölderlin), music (Schubert), and art (Caspar David Friedrich). Not least of this, as in the art of Jack Yeats, was the sense of isolation, the insignificant human figure in an indifferent world, far from Wordsworth’s pantheistic belief but at the heart of the Winterreise. This love is manifest more obviously in the later drama, where SB is less fearful of deciduous beauty. A good study of the Romantic impulse in SB’s writings, revealing unexpected insights into a tradition vehemently rejected but never quite denied, is currently lacking.

  (487) In the past few decades there have been scattered efforts to shed some light on isolated traces of, or references to, Romanticism, but it remains difficult to fathom Beckett’s ambiguous and somewhat paradoxical Introduction attitude toward this period in literature, music and art history. Far from being a comprehensive examination, the dossier on “Beckett and Romanticism” in the current issue of Samuel Beckett Today /

  Aujourd’hui

  tries to give an impetus to the study of this complex theme with contributions on Beckett’s attitudes toward Romantic aesthetics in general, including notions such as the sublime, irony, failure, ruins, fragments, fancy, imagination, epitaphs, translation, unreachable horizons, the infinite, the infinitesimal and the unfinished, but also on Beckett’s reading about the Romantic period (such as Mario Praz’s The

  Romantic Agony

  and Théophile Gautier’s Histoire du romantisme), his affinity with specific Romantic artists and their influence on works such as Murphy, the trilogy, Krapp’s Last Tape and All Strange Away.

  The second part of the current issue presents a selection of papers given at the Beckett at Reading 2006 conference in Reading (30 April –

  2 May 2006), which was jointly organised by the Beckett International Foundation and the University’s School of English and American Literature. The conference marked Beckett’s centenary, an event that

  th

  Beckett himself had viewed in 1981 (the year of his 75 Birthday) as something to be avoided: I dread the year now upon us and all the fuss in store for me here, as if it were my centenary. I’ll make myself scarce while it lasts, where I don’t know. Perhaps the Great Wall of China, crouch behind it till the coast is clear.

  (Letter to Jocelyn Herbert, 11 January 1981; RUL) Reflecting the importance of the Beckett Foundation’s Archive to scholars, the focus of the conference somewhat naturally tended to be on empirical research and manuscript studies, but this did not exclude other approaches. Indeed, the variety of essays included in this issue shows the importance and benefits of scholarly dialogue and cross- fertilization between different approaches. Scholars attending the conference were also introduced to the ongoing project of establishing digital editions of Beckett’s manuscripts, and an outline of this work is presented at the end of the section.

  While the previous SBT/A volume (Présence de Samuel Beckett) was predominantly French, the current issue is mainly English. Its “Freespace,” however, is truly bilingual. Different forms of otherness characterize several of these contributions, opening with essays on Beckett and Judaism, and the enunciative relation between author and

  Introduction text (focusing on Blanchot, Foucault, and Agamben). Falling down is the central motif in two other English essays, whereas the French contributions zoom in on linguistic matters, the posture of prayer in Beckett’s works and the relationship between Charles Juliet and Samuel Beckett. The volume as a whole shows that Beckett Studies is in a better state than Murphy during its arduous journey toward publication, described by Beckett as “All Sturm and no Drang” (letter to Mary Manning Howe, 14 November 1936; HRHRC).

  

“ACCURSED CREATOR”:

Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus”

Dirk Van Hulle

  The Romantic period is part of what Reinhart Koselleck has called the

  

Sattelzeit (‘saddle period’), the era that flanks the French Revolution by fifty

  years on either side. To investigate Beckett’s ambiguous attitude towards this period, this essay starts with the Graveyard Poets and concludes with Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny” – as she called Frankenstein in the introduction to the 1831 edition. The essay investigates the relationship between “the modern Prometheus” and his “creature,” and the theme of creation as a muddy but central issue in Beckett’s works and self-translations.

  The subtitle of Mary Shelley’s most famous book refers to Frankenstein as “the modern Prometheus.” The rebellious Titan who steals fire from Olympus to save mankind was the champion of the great Romantic poets, notably Byron and Percy Shelley. The idea of defying the gods has not only had an influence on Romantic poetics, but was still noticeable in post-war literature as an artistic tendency which John Barth referred to as “the romantic tradition of rebelling against Tradition” (65). This defiant aspect of the Prometheus myth can be retraced in Samuel Beckett’s works, as Angela Moorjani has shown with reference to Catastrophe, suggesting a correspondence between the Protagonist and a “defiant Prometheus” in opposition to the “Zeuslike” Director (2005, 194). The present essay focuses on another aspect of the Prometheus myth, which has its origins in the Roman version of the Prometheus legend, notably in the Metamorphoses: the Ovidian Prometheus creates human beings by mixing earth with rain. The resulting mud is what we are, according to the text of Eh Joe: “Mud thou art” (1990, 365) instead of “dust” – as in the King James version of Genesis (III.19). In Rick Cluchey’s copy of the bilingual English/German edition, in the right margin next to the line “Mud thou art” / “Dreck bist du,” Beckett’s marginalia refer to Luther’s translation: “Den[n] du bist Erde / u[nd] sollst zu Erde werden /

  1

  (Luther) / Genesis III 19” (RUL MS 3626, 59). At the same time this

  Dirk Van Hulle biblical reference is also an allusion to Goethe’s line “die Erde hat mich wieder” immediately after Faust’s suicide attempt, which Beckett quoted with a twist in the Addenda to Watt: “die Merde hat mich wieder” (1981, 251).

  1. “night’s young thoughts”

  In this down-to-earth view of humanity the origin of human creatures coincides with their final resting place, the focal point of the Graveyard Poets. In Murphy, Samuel Beckett refers to one of these poets by trivializing Edward Young’s Night Thoughts: “But now it was winter- time again, night’s young thoughts had been put back an hour” (73-74). The same pun recurs in the eighth of the Texts for Nothing, but this time in the form of a self-translation:

  Tout cela est libre, tout cela est tentant. Vais-je y glisser, essayer d’en faire profiter encore une fois, mes infirmités de rêve, pour qu’elles deviennent chair et tournent, en s’aggravant, autour de cette place grandiose que je confonds peut-être avec celle de la Bastille, jusqu’à être jugées dignes de l’adjacent Père-Lachaise ou, mieux, prématurément soulagées en voulant traverser, à l’heure du berger.

  (1991, 173) The vacancy is tempting, shall I enthrone my infirmities, give them this chance again, my dream infirmities, that they may take flesh and move, deteriorating, round and round this grandiose square which I hope I don’t confuse with the Bastille, until they are deemed worthy of the adjacent Père Lachaise or, better still, prematurely relieved trying to cross over, at the hour of night’s young thoughts.

  (1995, 134) The reversal of “night” and “young” is symptomatic of Beckett’s problematic attitude towards pre-Romantic and Romantic authors. He often pokes fun at them and yet he seems to be strangely attracted to (at least certain aspects of) their works. In the case of the Graveyard Poets, the attraction may be connected less with the “pleasures of melancholy”

• – as Thomas Warton called them – but with a more general dissatisfaction with an enlightened confidence in knowability. With regard to schoolmen and sages, Thomas Parnell already wrote in his

  “Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus” “Night-Piece on Death”: “Their books from wisdom widely stray, / Or point at best the longest way. / I’ll seek a readier path, and go / Where wisdom’s surely taught below” (qtd. in Punter and Byron, 11). David Punter and Glennis Byron summarize the Graveyard Poets’ aesthetics as an attempt to learn the secrets of life “from prolonged and absorbed meditation on its extreme limit: death” (11). Against this background Beckett’s reference to the Graveyard Poets may seem to be a reaction to Joyce’s encyclopaedic approach to literature – “in the direction of knowing more” (qtd. in Knowlson 1996, 352) – but the matter is more complex than it may appear to be.

  After the war, Beckett still admitted to Jake Schwartz that he had an “innate passion for knowledge, which demanded periodic satisfaction” and that secretly he even dreamed of reading through all the volumes of an encyclopaedia – after which he received a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to quench his thirst for knowledge (Bair, 493-94). But this Faustian trait is relativized in a letter to Jacoba van Velde (12 April 1958): “On m’a donné l’édition 1911 de l’Encyclopédie Britannique. 28 volumes. Trop tard.” (NAF 19794, 53).

  It might have been “too late” for encyclopaedic projects, but the question is whether Beckett would ever have been able to engage himself with total abandon in any encyclopaedic project, for a quarter of a century earlier he had already discovered that, in spite of this innate passion for knowledge, the accumulation of erudition and “verbal booty” was more of an obstacle than a incentive to his literary

  2

  projects. Similarly, his allusions to Edward Young and the Graveyard Poets involve a complex combination of attraction and resistance, as H. Porter Abbott notes: “By appropriating the romantic tradition of the associative, incondite meditation, Beckett accentuates his difference” (91). Porter Abbott draws attention to the stylistic correspondences between the “vaguely iambic dying fall” in Young’s Night Thoughts and the twilight passages in Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, but he immediately points out the differences as well:

  In the romantic tradition, the quality of being formally unreined is grounded in the confidence that the individual mind can generate, through the free exercise of its own powers, texts that would be at once beautiful and wise, coherent and deep. The very looseness of the form in this tradition was a promise of higher connectedness; its obscurity, an intimation of higher meaning. But in Beckett’s

  Dirk Van Hulle hands, the ‘looseness’ of the text augments the anxiety of relatedness and the despair of meaning.

  (91) The same confidence characterizes Young’s “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759): “The mind of a man of Genius is a fertile and pleasant field” (§34). Young emphasizes that unlike imitations, which are “often a sort of Manufacture,” an Original “rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius” (§43). The “man of Genius” Young had in mind was modelled after a particular image, that had already been suggested in the beginning of the eighteenth century by the Earl of Shaftesbury in his Advice to an Author (1710): “Such a poet is indeed a second Maker; a just Prometheus under Jove” (qtd. in Abrams 1953, 280). In the history of the so-called Genie-Zeit, the figure of Prometheus personified the defiance of authority and established poetic codes.

  As Jochen Schmidt illustrates in Die Geschichte des Genie-

  Gedankens

  , the idea of the artist as a god on earth (deus in terris), which was already prominent in the Renaissance, became more distinct when it was linked to the figure of Prometheus during the Genie-Zeit (Schmidt, 258-59). But it was Goethe who turned this simile into a programme by means of his poem “Prometheus,” which Beckett typed out (TCD MS 10971/1, 72r-v). As Mark Nixon points out (2006, 265), this excerpt is inextricably linked up with Beckett’s reading of John G. Robertson’s A History of German Literature (1902) and Goethe’s Aus

  meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit

  , the reading traces of which can also be found in the same notebook. In Beckett’s Books Matthew Feldman draws particular attention to the final stanza in relation to Beckett’s persistent exploration of “the creative act itself” in his post- war works (2006, 27).

  Both aspects of the mythical Prometheus – the defiant fire/light- bringer and the creator (referred to as Prometheus plasticator) – resonate in Beckett’s works. James Knowlson establishes a link between Beckett’s early reading of Goethe’s poem and his post-war works by pointing out that, towards the end of the 1960s, Beckett “quoted with relish in German some of the rebellious, accusatory lines of the poem” (568), echoes of which recur in Lessness. The sole upright figure which “will curse God [...] face to the open sky” (1995, 197 and 201) resembles the attitude of the creature as Prometheus moulded it, according to Ovid: whereas other creatures walked with their heads

  “Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus” facing downwards, looking at the earth, human beings were given an “upturned aspect” (trans. Kline), because Prometheus commanded them to stand upright and look towards the sky (“os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre / iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus”; Ovid, I.85-86).

  Apart from Prometheus’ defiance, his role as plasticator also seems to have caught Beckett’s special attention. Goethe’s Prometheus is not just one of the “rebels of the Genieperiode [who] exploited the element of Promethean defiance against vested authority, in order to attack the code of poetic rules,” as Abrams calls them; he is as ambitious as Doctor Praetorius in James Whale’s The Bride of

  Frankenstein

  (1935) in that he is intent on creating not just a homunculus (like Faust’s assistant Wagner), but an entire species: Hier sitz ich, form Menschen Nach meinem Bilde, Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei” (Here I sit, making men / In my own image, / A race that shall be like me)

  (TCD MS 10971/1/72) A year after the release of Whale’s Faustian sequel of Frankenstein, Beckett read (and took extensive excerpts from) Goethe’s Faust. After that reading experience, the focus on the creative act was increasingly mixed with the image of the homunculus. The making of such a small

  3

  creature recurs a few times in the trilogy. Beckett’s own “creatures” may be regarded as “homuncules” too, but what characterizes these literary compositions is that they are mainly occupied with decomposition.

  2. “turning-point,” or: Wordsworth Ho

  In this context it is remarkable how Beckett, presenting his work as a composition in reverse, uses Wordsworth as a contrasting background, notably his famous definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” taking its origin “from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” While Wordsworth explains how “successful composition

  4

  generally begins,” Beckett is more interested in “decomposition.” In the years immediately after the so-called revelation, Wordsworth’s famous definition is insistently distorted, for instance in “The Expelled” (“Recollecting these emotions, with the celebrated advantage of

  Dirk Van Hulle tranquillity” [Beckett 1995, 58]) and in Texts for Nothing (“what tranquillity, and know there are no more emotions in store” [125]). But it is in the trilogy that Molloy formulates the important reversal of composition into decomposition: “It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life [...] To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don’t torment me, but one sometimes forgets” (1955-58, 25). This reversal comes close to the “tuning-point” in Krapp’s Last Tape, which only became “the vision at last” in the third typescript: “Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the pier, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when

  vision

  suddenly I saw the whole thing. The turning-point , at last” (HRHRC 4.2, Ts. 3).

  Krapp’s “vision” thus turns out to be a revision. Beckett explicitly asked James Knowlson to make clear once and for all that his own “revelation” was different from “Krapp’s vision” (Knowlson, 352; 772n55). Beckett’s reformulation of his own vision contrasted his own working method with Joyce’s. In this context Beckett’s vision also indicates a “turning-point” between a Joycean “work in progress” and his own “work in regress” – not simply in the sense of doing the opposite of Joyce, but rather as a radicalisation of the idea to accommodate decomposition in one’s composition, which is already present in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, “writing its own wrunes forever” (Joyce 1939, 19).

  Beckett’s written ruins are quite different from the “self- indulgence of Ossianic antiquarianism and the eighteenth-century taste for ruins,” which “have no attraction for him,” as John Pilling notes (1976, 136). Beckett’s writings are “wrunes” in the etymological sense of ruere, to collapse, to fall down. While the sole upright figure in

  Lessness

  may have been inspired by “Prometheus,” the text also writes its own ruins, opening with the words “Ruins true refuge” (1995, 197). In a similar way Winnie in Happy Days is decomposing in upright position. As a consequence, the “turning-point” implies a double perspective on the Prometheus myth in terms of creation and decreation, composition and decomposition, but also with regard to the relationship between creator and creature.

  3. “Accursed progenitor”

  In 1816 Byron and Shelley were still continuing the tradition that was set in motion by the Sturm und Drang poets, such as the young Goethe,

  “Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus” regarding Prometheus as a satanic hero. In his Dichtung und Wahrheit Goethe argues that the difference between (notably Milton’s) Satan and Prometheus is that the latter is more contructive: Milton’s Satan attempts to destroy God’s creation while Prometheus is a creator himself (Goethe 1991, 687). Byron, in his poem “Prometheus,” pities his hero (“Thy Godlike crime was to be kind [...] / And strengthen Man with his own mind,” 265), whereas Percy Shelley, in the “Preface” to

  Prometheus Unbound

  , sees his hero as “the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends” (207). The only imaginary being resembling Prometheus, according to Shelley, is another bringer of light: Lucifer or Satan, as depicted in Milton’s

  Paradise Lost

  (206-7). In A Defence of Poetry, too, he claims that “Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil” (526).

  While Percy Shelley clearly expressed his sympathy with Promethean bringers of fire and light, Mary Shelley empathized with Adam, as the epigraph to Frankenstein, or: The Modern Prometheus indicates: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mold me man, did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me? –– / Paradise Lost” (1992, 1). In Milton’s Paradise Lost, these lines are preceded by Adam’s exclamation: “O fleeting joys / Of Paradise, dear bought with lasting woes!” (262; Book X.741-42), which are the lines Winnie refers to in Happy Days: “What is that wonderful line? [Lips.] Oh fleeting joys – [lips] – oh something lasting woe.” [Lips. She is interrupted by

  

disturbance from Willie. He is sitting up. She lowers lipstick and mirror

  […]]” (Beckett 1990, 141). Each “oh” is preceded by “lips,” prefiguring Mouth’s lips in Not I, but also stressing the importance of cosmetics in the midst of terrestrial joys and woes: the common etymology of cosmos and cosmetics is Winnie’s answer to Beckett’s quest for a “new form” which “admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else,” as Beckett told Tom Driver in the same year as the first production of Happy Days: “To find a form

  5

  that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” The link with the epigraph of Frankenstein reinforces the importance of the “turning-point” in Beckett’s poetics, which seems to imply a bidirectional perspective, analogous to the difference between Percy and Mary Shelley’s respective viewpoints on Paradise Lost. Not

  Dirk Van Hulle Satan, not Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, but Frankenstein’s creature, Eve and Adam, Winnie and Willie become the focalizers. In

  Endgame

  , Hamm would prefer to undo creation, cursing his father as “Accursed progenitor!” and “Accursed fornicator!” (1990, 96) – insisting on the same “-tor” ending with an exclamation mark as in the Creature’s exclamation: “Accursed creator!” when he discovers Frankenstein’s journal: “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? [...] Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.” (126)

  During the important moment in Frankenstein when Victor meets the “daemon” at the sea of ice in the middle of the “tremendous,” “vast,” “sublime,” “awful,” “magnificent,” “majectic,” and “solitary grandeur of the scene” (93-94) the creature reminds Frankenstein of his duties as a father: “Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel” (96-97), threatening to become “the author of your own speedy ruin” (98).

  When the focalization shifts to the nameless daemon and he is allowed to tell his tale, Mary Shelley inserts a moment of defamiliarization by presenting the rising of the moon as if it were an unprecedented phenomenon: “I started up and beheld a radiant form rise from among the trees” (99-100). In his Defence of Poetry Percy Shelley formulated this Shklovskyan defamiliarization avant la lettre by presenting poetry as the power that “creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration” and “purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being” (533). It is with this unprejudiced, childlike view that the creature observes the De Laceys.

  Since “[a]ll things exist as they are perceived” (533) – Percy Shelley’s variation on Berkeley’s esse est percipi – the De Lacey family only exists in literary history as it is perceived by the Creature.

  Especially the old De Lacey thus comes across as the incarnation of kindness. This moment is referred to in Murphy as an arch scene of sentimentality: “‘All you need,’ said Wylie, ‘is a little kindness […] Miss Counihan and I are your friends.’ Cooper could not have looked more gratified if he had been Frankenstein’s daemon and Wylie De Lacey.” (Beckett 1957, 123-24) The first thing Frankenstein’s “daemon” sees through a chink in the wood is a small room that is “very bare of furniture”: “In one corner, near a small fire, sat an old

  “Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus” man, leaning his head on his hands in a disconsolate attitude” (104). While the De Lacey scene as a whole is ridiculed in Murphy, the more specific image of an old man with his head on his hands recurs repeatedly in Beckett’s later works, up until the penultimate text,

  

Stirrings Still : “One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw

himself rise and go” (Beckett 1995, 259).

  The old De Lacey in Frankenstein plays a mournful air on his instrument and a few lines further on the creature is overpowered by emotions, “a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as I had never before experienced” (104). The “pain and pleasure” and powerful emotions,

  6

  reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads and Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Idea of

  7 the Sublime and the Beautiful

  (1757), recur in Beckett’s radio play

  Words and Music

  : “by passion we are to understand a movement of the soul pursuing or fleeing real or imagined pleasure or pain pleasure or pain real or imagined pleasure or pain” (1990, 287). When a few moments later Music “Plays air,” Words is “Trying to sing, softly” of “a man / Huddled o’er the ingle” and “The face in the ashes” (291).

  These ashes may be seen as remnants of Prometheus’ gift to humanity, but also – since the radio plays are so extraordinarily metafictional – as embers of a Romantic poetics, expressed in Percy Shelley’s Defence of Poetry by means of the image of the “fading coal”: “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness:

  

8

this power arises from within” (531).

  Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man refers this image when he is setting forth his aesthetic theory on the scholastic quidditas:

  The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure

  (Joyce 2000, 231) Unlike the overconfident young Dedalus’ stress on “clear radiance,” Beckett’s works seem to have more affinity with the “fading” aspect of the coal and Shelley’s subsequent description: “when composition Dirk Van Hulle begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet” (531; emphasis added). This passage contrasts sharply with the triumphant tone of the rest of the “Defence,” which celebrates poetry as “something divine” (531). Shelley sees it as “at once the centre and circumference of knowledge” with its “harmonious recurrence of sound”: “Hence the vanity of translation” (514). In the midst of this boisterous discourse, the “fading” of inspiration “on the decline” comes across as a moment of weakness in terms of rhetorical strategy. He has to admit that poetry inevitably fails to preserve the brilliance and radiance of the initial moment of inspiration. Beckett, however, focuses precisely on this “decline” and turns it into a view on composition as a form of decomposition, in which both translation and its “vanity” are crucial components.

  Translation played an important role in literary Romanticism, especially in Germany. Adreas Huyssen sees translation as “eine Grundstruktur romantischen Denkens” (a basic structure of romantic thought; 121). While Percy Shelley spoke of “the vanity of translation” and “the burthen of the curse of Babel” (514), August Wilhelm Schlegel regarded poetic translations as merely imperfect approximations. Because of the unreachability of the original the approximation can be referred to such a distance that it might not be

  9

  worthwhile undertaking the enterprise at all. And yet, that is precisely the irresistible challenge of translation, the “unendliche Annäherung” (endless approximation; Huyssen, 121), which is the idea behind the

  but also behind the asymptotic structure of Beckett’s late works like Worstward Ho (“leastmost in the utmost dim”), Stirrings

  Still

  (“and here a word he could not catch”), and of course “Comment dire” / “what is the word.” In spite of this close affinity, the difference between the Romantics’ and Beckett’s notion of “unendliche Annäherung” is a reversal of perspective. Whereas the Romantic

  Sehnsucht

  for the sake of Sehnsucht is a longing for the infinite, Beckett ‘strives’ after the infinitesimal. In Romanticism, Huyssen argues, translation becomes an allegory of the unreachable original (121). Beckett radicalized this idea by applying it to his own writings. By means of self-translation he turns his own works into unreachable originals. Thus, “night’s young thoughts” in Murphy differ from “night’s young thoughts” in Texts for

  Nothing

  . The former are translated into French as “les jeunes pensées

  “Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus” de la nuit avaient été reculées d’une heure” (1965, 58) and because of this recul they will (not unlike Achilles and the tortoise in Zeno’s paradox) never be able to catch up with Young’s Night Thoughts. In fact, they are only further removed from “l’heure du berger” – which is the “original” of the latter “thoughts,” translated from the French, stressing the unreachability of the original, until the infirmities “are deemed worthy of the adjacent Père Lachaise” (134). As Porter Abbott notes: “For Young, the graveyard was a place one passed through, coming out on the other side refined of one’s material being. In Beckett’s text, it seems instead a longed-for point of reentry” (92).

  This longed-for reentry has more affinities with the moment at the end of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when Victor finds himself “at the entrance of the cemetery” (195) where everything is silent “except the leaves of the trees” (which Didi compares to the noise of the “dead voices” in Waiting for Godot; 1990, 58). But Victor Frankenstein is not allowed to stay, for his Creature lures him away again from the graveyard, that is, the place where its body parts were assembled. In the end, the place of the hideous progeny’s origin comes down to earth,

  

Dreck , the “mud” or “dust thou art.” Beckett’s interest in what has so

  equestrianly been called the Sattelzeit is inevitably saddled with the realization that the main thing we do “à cheval” is to “give birth astride of a grave” (2003, 220).

  

Notes

1. I wish to thank Mark Nixon for drawing my attention to this document.

  2. In his seminal introduction to the edition of the Dream Notebook, John Pilling notes that, by the end of 1931, “what had seemed to offer a way forward was beginning to reveal itself as an impediment,” referring to Beckett’s letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 8 November 1931, in which he writes: “I have enough ‘butin verbal’ to strangle anything I’m likely to want to say.” (qtd. in Pilling 1999, xiv).

  3. Malone mentions his “want of a homuncule” and concludes: “Yes, a little creature, I shall try and make a little creature, to hold in my arms, a little creature in my image, no matter what I say” (1955-58, 225-26). The Unnamable in his turn claims he has wasted his time “behind my mannikins” (1955-58, 306), which in the French version are called “homuncules” (1953, 32).

  Dirk Van Hulle 4. “The emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” (Wordsworth; 1802 version) 5. “What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” (Samuel Beckett to Tom F. Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum 4, Nr. 3 (1961), 23; qtd. in Hesla, 6- 7) 6. “What then does the Poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and re-acting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure” (Wordsworth; 1802 version). 7. “Sect. VII. Of the Sublime / Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the ‘strongest emotion’ because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure” (86).

  8. In the third section of Stirrings Still a sentence thus arises “from deep within.” It is significant that as soon as it surfaces, it is already “on the decline,” for the most crucial word is missing: “So on till stayed when to his ears from deep within oh how and here a word he could not catch it were to end where never till then” (1995, 264).

  9. According to Schlegel “Alle dichterischen Übersetzungen sind nur unvollkommene Annäherungen. Die Annäherung kann durch die

  Unnachahmlichkeit und Unerreichbarkeit des Originals in eine so weite Ferne verwiesen werden, dass man dan wohl besser tut, die Sache gar nicht zu unternehmen” (A. W. Schlegel, “Aus dem Indischen,” qtd. in Huyssen, 85).

  10. Based on a folk tale about a flower that gives access to hidden treasures, the blue flower became a symbol of Romantic Sehnsucht for the infinite. To a large extent, this development is due to Novalis’ novel fragment Heinrich von

  

Ofterdingen , in which the eponymous hero feels a longing, not for the

  “Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism, and “the Modern Prometheus” treasures, but for the flower, so that the Blaue Blume became a symbol for a second-degree Sehnsucht, a longing for longing. For Beckett’s use of the symbol in “Assumption,” “Calvary by Night,” and Watt, see Ackerley and Gontarski, 2004, 63-64).

  

Works Cited

  Abbott, A. Porter, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Authograph (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1996). Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953). Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove P, 2004). Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: a biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978). Barth, John, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in The Friday Book: Essays and

  Other Nonfiction (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), 62-76.

  Beckett, Samuel, Notes on German Literature, TCD MS 10971/1, Trinity College Dublin (1934-36).