All sturm and no drang beckett and romanticism beckett at reading

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

Beckett and Romanticism

Beckett at Reading 2006

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Beckett and Romanticism

1 Dirk Van Hulle

“Accursed Creator”: Beckett, Romanticism

2 Paul Lawley

3 Elizabeth Barry

The Long View: Beckett, Johnson, Wordsworth

4 Mark Nixon

5 Chris Ackerley

6 Franz Michael Maier

Two Versions of Nacht und Träume: What Franz Schubert

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,

9 Michael Angelo Rodriguez

Romantic Agony: Fancy and Imagination

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

12 John Pilling

From an Abandoned Work:

13 Anthony Cordingley

Beckett and “l’ordre naturel”:

The Universal Grammar of Comment c'est/How It Is 185

14 Marion Fries-Dieckmann

15 Rónán McDonald

“What a male!”: Triangularity, Desire

16 Sean Lawlor

“Alba” and “Dortmunder”:

17 David A Hatch

Samuel Beckett’s “Che Sciagura”

18 Paul Stewart

A Rump Sexuality: The Recurrence

19 Gregory Byala

20 Maximilian de Gaynesford

21 Karine Germoni

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

Molloy: de ‘jeux de mots’ aux

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:

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

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 Beckett himself had viewed in 1981 (the year of his 75th 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

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)

BECKETT AND ROMANTICISM

“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 / (Luther) / Genesis III 19” (RUL MS 3626, 59).1 At the same time this

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

“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 projects.2 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

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

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)

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 generally begins,”4 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

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 suddenly I saw the whole thing The turning-point vision, 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 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

“self-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,

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

that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”5

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

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

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,

reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads6 and

Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Idea of

the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757),7 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: this power arises from within” (531).8

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

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 worthwhile undertaking the enterprise at all.9 And yet, that is precisely the irresistible challenge of translation, the “unendliche Annäherung” (endless approximation; Huyssen, 121), which is the idea behind the

Blaue Blume10 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

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)

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

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),

–, L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1953)

–, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove P, 1955-58) –, Murphy (New York: Grove P, 1957)

–, Typescripts of Krapp’s Last Tape, HRHRC Samuel Beckett Box 4, Folder

2, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (1958)

–, Murphy (Paris: Minuit, 1965)

–, Watt (London: Calder, 1981)

–, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990)

–, The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, ed S E Gontarski (New York:

Grove P, 1995)

–, Warten auf Godot / En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot (Frankfurt am

Main : Suhrkamp, 2003)

Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful

(London: Penguin Classics, 1998)

Byron, The Major Works, ed Jerome McGann (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) Feldman, Matthew, Beckett’s Books : A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s

Interwar Notes (New York / London: Continuum: 2006)

Frost, Everett, and Jane Maxwell, compilers, “Catalogues of ‘Notes Diverse[s] Holo’ and of the Samuel Beckett Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin

Library,” in SBT/A 16, ed Matthijs Engelberts, et al (Amsterdam:

Rodopi, 2006), 13-199

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun.,

1986)

Hesla, David, The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel

Beckett (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971)

Huyssen, Andreas, Die frühromantische Konzeption von Übersetzung und

Aneignung (Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1969)

Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939)

–, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 2000)

Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London:

Bloomsbury, 1996)

Koselleck, Reinhart, “Einleitung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe:

Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed

Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, vol 1 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004)

Milton, John, Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004)

Moorjani, Angela, “Directing or In-directing Beckett: Or What Is Wrong with

Catastrophe’s Director?” in SBT/A 15, “Historicising Beckett / Issues of

Performance,” ed Marius Buning et al (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 187-99

Nixon, Mark, “‘Scraps of German’: Samuel Beckett Reading German

Literature,” in SBT/A 16, “Notes Diverse[s] Holo,” ed Matthijs

Engelberts, Everett Frost, with Jane Maxwell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 259-82

Ovid, (Publius Ovidius Naso), Metamorphoses, ed Hugo Mangus, The

Perseus Digital Library, www.perseus.tufts.edu, accessed 15 May 2007

–, The Metamorphoses, trans A S Kline, 2000, www.tkline freeserve.co.uk/

Ovhome.htm, accessed 15 May 2007

Parnell, Thomas, “Night-Piece on Death,” in Poems on Several Occasions

(London: Lintot, 1722), www.litgothic.com/Texts, accessed 13 May

Literatur, Philosophie und Politik 1750-1945, 2 vols (Darmstadt:

Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985)

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, or: The Modern Prometheus (London: Penguin

Classics, 1992)

Shelley, Percy, Poetry and Prose, 2nd ed., ed Donald H Reiman (New York and London: W W Norton, 2002)

Warton, Thomas, The Pleasures of Melancholy (London: Dodsley, 1747) Wordsworth, William, “Preface,” in Lyrical Ballads, electronic scholarly

edition by Bruce Graver and Ron Tetreault, www.rc.umd.edu/ editions/LB, accessed 15 May 2007

Young, Edward, “Conjectures on Original Composition,” http://rpo.library utoronto.ca/display/displayprose.cfm?prosenum=16, accessed 24 May

2007

FAILURE AND TRADITION:

COLERIDGE / BECKETT

Paul Lawley

Using a model of literary tradition derived from T S Eliot and mediated by J

L Borges, this paper proposes a tradition of creative failure which would

enable the work of Beckett to be read through that of S T Coleridge, and

vice-versa Two texts by Coleridge are briefly considered in this context, and the problematic of creative failure in which they are implicated is related to

key claims in Beckett’s Three Dialogues A concluding statement suggests the

benefits of reading Coleridge and Beckett within the common perspective of a literary tradition, the perception of which the two writers both shape and are shaped by

I

The sea is very calm because, Hamm helpfully explains, “there are no more navigators” (Beckett 1986, 124) But once there were (“Once!”), and a particularly old one more than once told a story It was about

“how the Ancient Mariner cruelly and in contempt of the laws of hospitality killed a Sea-bird and how he was followed by many and strange Judgements: and in what manner he came back to his own Country” (Coleridge 1969, 186; 1800 text) The last of the strange judgements passed upon the old navigator1 is, if not the most colourful, certainly not the least terrible When he implores a hermit to “shrieve” him, the “holy Man” bids him say “What manner man art thou?” and the Ancient Mariner recounts the last event of his own story:

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrench’d

With a woeful agony,

Which forc’d me to begin my tale

And then it left me free

Since then at an uncertain hour,

Now oftimes and now fewer,

That anguish comes and makes me tell

My ghastly aventure

(544-45, lines 611-18, 1798 text) And then he begins, presumably, “There was a Ship …” (528, line 10) The final event of the Mariner’s story, the strangest of the strange judgements upon him, consists of his being compelled to tell his story

of transgression and strange judgements, a story which ends with him being compelled to tell his story … – and so on The mariner enters into

“[t]he Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH” (194) of his own tale; the snake swallows its own tail, and the “penance of life” (208) is endlessly exacted

water-Of course the poem is not like this As we all remember, it has a frame which comprehends the Mariner’s narrative, from “It is an ancyent Marinere,/And he stoppeth one of three” (528), by way of reference to the Wedding Guest’s reactions, through to “A sadder and a wiser man/He rose the morrow morn” (546) Coleridge’s monster of solitudes finally affirms the efficacy of prayer in “goodly company” (545) The frame is distinct from the narrative itself: “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” is not a recursive narrative To read it as such is not even an understandable misreading Yet it is a forgivable one, and to

speculate that the poem might have been recursive is a stimulating

critical gambit.2 Recursive narrative has, in the words of the psychoanalyst Donald P Spence, “an uncanny feel about it” (188) which fits with this most uncanny of poems No reader of Beckett, and

no post-Beckett reader (a rather different thing), can (re)turn to the poem without perceiving the shadow of recursion that falls upon and around it.3 That shadow alerts us to the relation between transgression, expiation and narrative act which is as strongly figured in “The Ancient Mariner” as in any Beckett text And, despite the apodictic statement in

Coleridge’s 1800 Argument (“many and strange Judgements”), it is no

less ambiguous in its nature Coleridge’s notebook entry dated 30 October 1800 further suggests the intimacy of recursion in writing with both impotence and the obscure experience of obligation: “He knew not what to do – something, he felt, must be done – he rose, drew his writing-desk suddenly before him – sate down, took the pen – & found that he knew not what to do” (Coleridge 1957, 834)

II

Coleridge and Beckett: both are writers preoccupied not just with what

is narrated or uttered, but with the act of narration itself, the Scene of Utterance, and with utterance which is impossible to regulate: it is either blocked or unstoppable, impossible or irresistible, compelled or obliged Both significantly abandoned works, and the relation of each

man’s texts to the state of completion is often richly ambiguous Failure

and fragmentation are omnipresent, if not always actual Thematically, too, ambiguous finitude is the common concern: the Nightmare Life-in-Death returns as and in “the long sonata of the dead” (Beckett 1959, 32).4

The analogies are intriguing, but they cannot in themselves be taken to constitute a significant critical relation – especially given the vast differences of creative context and philosophy which can properly

be assumed between the Romantic philosopher-poet and the Modern novelist and playwright Nor is this a matter of influence As he was hardly less of a “library-cormorant” (Coleridge 1966, 156) than Coleridge himself, Beckett would have known the major writings at the very least.5 But neither Damned to Fame nor The Grove Companion

contains a single reference to Coleridge Instead I should draw attention

to the influence of Beckett on our reading of Coleridge In this context

a famous passage by T S Eliot is worth revisiting “[W]hat happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it,” asserted Eliot

in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) “The existing order [of monuments],” he continues,

is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after

the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if

ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new Whoever has approved this idea of order […] will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed

by the past

(15) Eliot’s idea of tradition is monolithic: “the form of European, of English literature” is single, canonical The conservative emphasis on order, though it accommodates and even in some way brings about

internal alteration and readjustment, nonetheless inhibits the conception

of plural traditions For a more playful treatment of the idea, one which

characteristically homes in on the paradoxes involved and thereby implies plurality of perspective, we must go to Jorge Luis Borges’ essay “Kafka and His Precursors.”6

Borges describes the “Kafkaesque” features of texts by Zeno, Nan

Yu, Kierkegaard, Browning, Léon Bloy and Lord Dunsany (The motley nature of the crew itself suggests the implications for critical revaluation in this view.) He concludes:

In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist […] The

fact is that every writer creates his own precursors His work

modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future

(236; author’s italics) The footnoting of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” after the last of these sentences serves only to underline the difference in emphasis Where Eliot is concerned to establish the dynamics of the canon in an attempt to accommodate creative innovation to traditional cultural values, Borges is, both more and less modestly, interested in the parameters of meaning as they are evident in the paradox of readerly reception which surrounds the Kafkaesque

As indeed it surrounds the Beckettian We have already briefly reimagined “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” as recursive narrative However, viewing Coleridge through a Beckettian lens is a matter not just – indeed perhaps hardly at all – of remarking formal resemblance but of situating both writers within particular traditions.7 Consider one

of the most famous moments in Coleridge, the definitions of imagination – primary and secondary – and fancy in Chapter XIII of

Biographia Literaria This is one of the most celebrated of all instances

of philosophical literary criticism, yet to encounter it in its context is

disappointing The chapter is the last in Volume I of the Biographia, so

might have been expected to deliver a climactic statement It does so, but not without affecting an extravagant posture of retreat The first half

of the chapter (“On the imagination, or esemplastic power”) is conventionally philosophical, proposing “two contrary forces, the one

of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend

or find itself in this infinity” (162) “The counteraction […] of the two

assumed forces” is discussed, and its results contemplated But then the discussion breaks off with this:

Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received the following letter from a friend whose practical judgment I have had ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and sensibility preclude all the excuses which my self-love might possibly have prompted me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of equal good sense, but with less tact and feeling

(164) The friend upon whose practical judgement, taste, sensibility, tact and feeling Coleridge relies to guard against self-love turns out to be, as any editor will note, Coleridge himself The trusted friend records his feelings on encountering the foregoing paragraphs and assures the

author “that I look forward anxiously to your great book on the Constructive Philosophy which you have promised and announced: and

that I will do my best to understand it” (165) But he goes on to advise

unhesitatingly that the chapter should be withdrawn from this book and

reserved “for your announced treatise on the Logos or communicative

intellect in Man and Deity.” The argument has been so truncated in its

presentation, he says, “that what remains looks (…) like the fragments

of the winding steps of an old ruined tower.” “Be assured,” he warns,

“if you do publish this chapter in the present work, you will be

reminded of Bishop Berkeley’s Siris, announced as an Essay on

Tar-water, which beginning with Tar ends with the Trinity” (166)

The friend signs off (“Your affectionate, etc.”) and the author

responds to his advice:

In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume

(167) The definitions of primary and secondary imagination and of fancy then follow, and the chapter – the Volume – ends with the author trailing an amplified treatment of “the powers and privileges of the imagination

[…] in the critical essay on the uses of the supernatural in poetry and the principles that regulate its introduction: which the reader will find

prefixed to the poem of The Ancient Mariner” (167)

In fact the reader will not find it there – not in any of the editions Coleridge never wrote it Nor will the reader find at the end of the

Biographia the “detailed prospectus” for the “great book on the

Constructive Philosophy.” He never wrote that either And the reader

will similarly look in vain for the “treatise on the Logos or

communicative intellect in Man and Deity.” It is not, of course, that

Coleridge never wrote about these matters – far from it – but that the

projected theological-philosophical magnum opus never emerged It

remained a project This is Coleridge as Krapp – without the tapes and (usually) with maudlin self-pity rather than savage self-irony There are

“the aspirations […] the resolutions!” (Beckett 1986, 218) in the form

of the long project lists in the Notebooks: “My Works’ […] ‘The Origin

of Evil, an Epic Poem”; “On the art of prolonging Life – by getting up

in a morning” (Coleridge 1957, 161, 174) And then there are the

“awful occasions” of birthdays, with their inevitable reviews,

“separating the grain from the husks” (Beckett 1986, 217): “… so

completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month

– O Sorrow & Shame! I am not worthy to live – Two and thirty years –

& this last year above all others! – I have done nothing! …” (2237, Editor’s note: “There are four leaves cut out after this one.”)

The essential question about Chapter XIII, though, concerns the

kind of text the Biographia is at this point The self-interruption, the

staging of an interpersonal (non-philosophical) dialogue by interjection

of a fictional letter (which counsels fragmentation out of fear of the prospect of fragmentation), the explicit reference out to non-existent, though confidently projected, texts; and the mixing of all these with post-Kantian philosophical discourse: not only is the generic juxtaposition of autobiography and philosophy not muted; it is actually

highlighted – and it makes an effect which is hard not to perceive as

comic (The reference to Bishop Berkeley suggests Coleridge’s awareness of this.)8 Coleridge’s writing can be situated with that of

Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy), Swift (The Tale of a

Tub), Diderot (Jacques le Fataliste) and Sterne (Tristram Shandy), or

with that of E T A Hoffmann (Kater Murr) and Carlyle (Sartor

Resartus), or with that of Flaubert (Bouvard et Pécuchet) and Joyce

(Ulysses) These traditions – of Learned Wit, of Romantic Irony, of

Stoic Comedy (if indeed they should be thought of as separate) – are

ones in which Beckett, most clearly in Watt, but not only there, takes

his place.9 Indeed, he is both accommodated within them and in turn shapes our perception of them These are texts which not only present but variously enact and even embody metatextually the comedy of exhaustibility: a task of writing is to be accomplished, whether a duty, a profession, a calling or an obligation; the task is definable, even if enormous, and the ambition is encyclopaedic And it is possible – or so

it seems Yet the prodigies and contortions of redaction which are necessitated by the task always threaten to derail the project and themselves become its major concern Self-defeat is perpetually impending; the limitations of the medium, including generic and even typographical conventions, are pressed upon the reader, and the results are comic The comedy is one of incompletion, fragmentation and failure

Failure is the point The famous definition, which is framed by the dogged apologia I have described, is this: “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (167) Reviewing a translation of Rilke in 1936, Beckett

spoke of that poet’s urge to “rehabilitate the Ichgott” (Beckett 1983,

66), and of “that prime article of the Rilkean faith, which provides for the interchangeability of Rilke and God” (67) It might be said of

Coleridge’s definition that it is all too aware of the uninterchangeability

of Coleridge and God, and that this awareness is most fully registered

in the word “repetition.” Read within the context we have considered, the definition takes on a darker implication Because the human imagination cannot achieve the definitive status of the divine utterance,

it must repeat itself indefinitely Thus, as D F Rauber observes of Coleridge’s formulation, “it would seem that the re-creation would necessarily be incomplete and fragmentary” (218) Imaginative utterance is the guarantee of self-identity and the implication of its failure is therefore repetition: “Since then at an uncertain hour,/Now oftimes and now fewer,/That anguish comes and makes me tell/My ghastly aventure.” The narrative position of the Ancient Mariner – his

position inside a narrative, unable to extricate himself and exist

otherwise – is a grim counterpart of the definition of primary

imagination: he is compelled to repeat He is, as it were, in himself a

repetition.10 In its meticulous placing in relation to one another of imagination, self-identity, repetition and failure, Coleridge’s definition can be regarded as the iconic beginning of the “art of failure” which we

think of as distinctive of Beckett – Beckett being the writer who in the most direct and sustained manner confronted the implications of Coleridge’s theory In interview Beckett himself repeatedly insisted upon his paradoxical preoccupation with failure, impotence and ignorance in art as a response to the literary omnicompetence of his master Joyce.11 If this insistence feels strikingly like a repetition of Coleridge’s distinction between the finite and infinite minds (with Joyce in the role of Godlike artist, “unwitnessed witness of witnesses” [Beckett 1995, 151]),12 it is because the art of failure had always been there, nesting at the heart of a Romantic aesthetic which Coleridge propounded and, in some of his best poems, embodied

To cast Coleridge as himself a theoretical origin would seem ironic (He is, after all, among many other things, our greatest plagiarist.) It is a move which replicates the terms of his definition, in which presence and origin (“the infinite I AM”) are posed in sharp contradistinction to the absence (“the finite mind”) which necessitates

or obliges repetition Jacques Derrida’s critique of origins through the idea of repetition should make us wary of formulating “new” traditions

in this way Derrida writes of the kind of absence formed by repetition:

“It is not absence instead of presence, but a trace which replaces a presence which has never been present, an origin by means of which nothing has begun” (295) This is surely what Borges’ claim amounts to

in “Kafka and His Precursors”: “In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist” (236) In Borges’ conception of tradition, it really is as

with Beckett’s Bishop Berkeley: Esse est percipi Kafka’s “repetition”

of hitherto puzzling features in previous writing constitutes the “trace”

by which we formulate “virtual” origins – “an origin by means of

which nothing has begun.” Or, in Borges’ words, “every writer creates

his own precursors.” We are considering the Coleridge created by Beckett

III

Chapter XIII of the Biographia raises questions about Coleridge’s

relation to failure The various interruptions and extra-textual pointers have the effect of emphasising incompletion (Rarely does one come across such a juxtaposition of strategic self-defensiveness and philosophical self-confidence.) Whether or not we read it as comic in

effect, Coleridge is actively seeking the perception of fragmentarity in

his readers The effect of this is to make one feel that he needs the

perception of fragmentarity – that it is as comforting as the gothic

cliché of the friend’s letter: “… like the fragments of the winding steps

of an old ruined tower” (166) In other words, a genuine anxiety about

incompletion is turned into something recognisable and reassuring – a manufactured anxiety (In the Gothic imagination ruins are indeed true refuge.)

So it is with “Kubla Khan,” though there the case is more acute still The poem was written in 1797-98, but published only in 1816 (the

year before the Biographia), with the subtitle “A Vision in a Dream A

Fragment,” and a Preface which describes the interrupted genesis of the poem, insisting on its fragmentarity The reflection has long been commonplace: “If Coleridge had never published his Preface, who would have thought of ‘Kubla Khan’ as a fragment?” (200), asked Humphry House in 1953 But he did, and it is difficult merely to ignore the Preface An obvious interpretative move is to allow the Preface to dictate the thematic reading; thus the poem becomes reflexive and recapitulates the Preface (or vice-versa) in another mode The first part (lines 1-36) describes Kubla’s pleasure dome; the second (37-54) has the poet recalling a vision he once had and speculating on the probable consequences of his reviving its music within himself The crux of the second part, following the recollected vision of the “damsel with a dulcimer” (line 37) and her music, is located in the conditional subjunctivity of the poet’s response:

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air

(1969, 298, lines 42-46) Depending on the reading of these lines, “the whole poem can be made,” as Humphry House says, “to appear to be about the failure and frustration of the creative power […] ‘If only I could, but I can’t’” (201) House’s own rejection of such a reading is trenchant: “If this were a poem of frustration and failure, the movement would be slow and the stresses heavy […] The metre is light and fast; the paragraph moves from delight and surprise, through enthusiasm to ecstasy; no sensitive reader can read it otherwise” (202, 201) House’s insensitive