Beckett’s Dantes by Daniela Caselli

Author:Daniela Caselli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2005-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Notes

1 P. J. Murphy, ‘Language and being in the prose works of Samuel Beckett’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Reading, 1979, p. 57. This part of Murphy’s discussion does not appear in his later Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). Wishing not to transform chronological priority into ontological pre-eminence, in my discussion I will at times quote the English and at times the French text first.

2 Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier (London: Picador, 1988), p. 7; Mercier et Camier (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1970), p. 7.

3 Murphy, ‘Language and being’, pp. 55–56.

4 Murphy, ‘Language and being’, p. 56.

5 This does not happen in the French text: ‘Mais aussitôt le ciel s’assombrissait de nouveau et la pluie redoublait de violence’ (14).

6 For a discussion of the opening of Murphy see Carla Locatelli, La disdetta della parola: l’ermeneutica del silenzio nella prosa inglese di Samuel Beckett (Bologna: Patron, 1984), p. 20.

7 Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 96.

8 Mark Currie (ed.), Metafiction (London: Longman, 1995), p. 1. On the limits of the definition of metalangue see also Carla Locatelli, ‘“My life natural order more or less in the present more or less”: textual immanence as the textual impossible in Beckett’s works’, in Lois Oppenheim and Marius Buning (eds), Beckett On and On … (Madison, NJ, and London: Associated University Press, 1996), pp. 127–147, p. 135.

9 While in Eliot the hooded third party’s gender is explicitly undecidable, in Mercier and Camier the narrator, and most of the figures encountered by the pseudo-couple, are male.

10 Murphy, ‘Language and being’, p. 56.

11 Eric P. Levy unpersuasively claims that this man ‘remind[s] us of Cato at the base of the mountain of Purgatory’. Eric P. Levy, Samuel Beckett and the Voice of Species: A Study of the Prose Fiction (Totowa: Barnes and Noble, 1980), p. 48.

12 ‘The moon had raised her lamp on high, Cain was toiling up his firmament.’ Beckett, Dream, p. 130; Murphy, p. 48. Malone Dies reads: ‘I sometimes see shining afar and how is it the moon where Cain toils bowed beneath his burden never sheds its light on my face?’ Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy (London: Picador, 1979), p. 203.

13 RUL MS 4123. The comment precedes the transcription of Purgatorio III, 19–21, 26, 37. In TCD MS 10963 ‘shadowy figures’ (fol. 7) describes the crowd in Inferno III.

14 ‘il y a peu de chances par exemple que ma notoriété pénètre jusq’aux habitants de Londres ou de Cuq-Toulza’ (193); In Molloy we read: ‘just imagine that, for they had never heard of Watt, just imagine that too.’ Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy, p. 71.

15 Jean-Pierre Ferrini later recorded the Dante intertexts in Mercier et Camier, although he does not cite either Levy or my previous work on the subject. Jean-Pierre Ferrini, Dante et Beckett (Paris: Hermann, 2003), p. 7.

16 The examples are numerous. I record here as unpersuasive: the parallel between Mr Conaire’s horror of childbirth and Dante’s

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.