Samuel Beckett’s Remembrance of Texts Past: Shakespeare, Proust, and Joyce in Not I and That Time

78 SAMUEL BECKETT’S REMEMBRANCE OF TEXTS PAST: SHAKESPEARE, PROUST, AND JOYCE IN NOT I AND THAT TIME1 James Little DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2021.62.5 Abstract: This article investigates intertexts in Samuel Beckett’s late theatre as modes of authorial memory, while also paying attention to the role of the reader. Drawing on the recent digital genetic edition of Beckett’s Not I / Pas moi and That Time / Cette fois, it uses archival evidence to examine Beckett’s engagement with the works of William Shakespeare, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce in the composition of these plays. Since, in many cases, Beckett’s use of literary intertexts cannot be tied to material traces in the archive, the article proposes the term “memotext” to denote intertexts drawn from memory rather than from a particular edition, modelled on Julia Kristeva’s concepts of “genotext” and “phenotext.” Keywords: genetic criticism, intertextuality, Samuel Beckett, William Shakespeare, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Julia Kristeva. Introduction Responding to a 1972 questionnaire sent by James Knowlson which asked if the theatre of W.B. Yeats was “consciously in mind as you wrote Waiting for Godot,” Samuel Beckett refuted the idea that he could shed any light on his work’s intertexs: 1 This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). Parts of this article have appeared in James Little, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas (Brussels and London: Bloomsbury, 2021). Samuel Beckett’s Remembrance of Texts Past 79 I simply know next to nothing about my work in this way, as little as a plumber of the history of hydraulics. There is nothing/nobody with me when I’m writing, only the hellish job in hand. The “eye of the mind” in H.D. does not refer to Yeats any more that [for than] the “revels ...” in Endgame to The Tempest, they are just bits of pipe I happen to have with me. I suppose all is reminiscence from womb to tomb, all I can say is I have scant information concerning mine – alas.2 In comparing the intertextually ignorant author to a plumber unaware of “the history of hydraulics,” Beckett presents writing as an act of practical craftsmanship, with the author aware of what they need to know in order to perform the creative task at hand, but no more. He then gives these intertexts the memorable description of being “bits of pipe I happen to have with me,” acknowledging the key role they play in the creative process – no plumbing without pipes, after all – before qualifying his opening refutation: “I suppose all is reminiscence from womb to tomb.” Other writers might indeed be with Beckett when he is writing, but the author is going to tell us nothing, or “next to nothing” about how they function in his work. In fact, the “scant information” he promises to the literary critic is substantially more than nothing, the intertextual reference to The Tempest being one that Beckett himself introduces into the exchange. In the course of one paragraph, Beckett’s refutation of conscious intertextual borrowings morphs into a generalized acknowledgement of the role of memory in the writing process. For literary scholars, the question is how to analyse the different modes of authorial memory when it comes to intertexts in their work. In the five decades since Beckett made these comments to Knowlson, scholars have done much work on his “intertextual method,” tracking the ways in which he incorporates the work of various authors, which sometimes involved drawing from secondary source books on topics such as psychology and philosophy.3 This 2 The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 4, 1966-1989, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) 291. “H.D.” stands for Happy Days. The questionnaire can be found in the University of Reading’s Special Collections, JEK 1/2/4. 3 Anthony Uhlmann, “Beckett’s Intertexts,” The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 103. See C. J. Ackerley, Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated “Watt” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); C.J. Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated “Murphy” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); David Tucker, Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx: Tracing “a Literary Fantasia” (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); Matthew Feldman, Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s “Interwar Notes” (New James Little 80 research has had implications for how we view the figure of the author. In her study of Beckett’s intertextual dialogue with the works of Dante, Daniela Caselli argues that “Dante’s presence in Beckett is part of a critique of value and authority.”4 Rather than considering the author as a stable figure against whom intertextual references can be measured, Caselli’s Beckett “is assumed to be not the origin of the texts but a figure of power emerging from them, which inevitably remains powerful even when professing his own powerlessness.”5 In other words, the study of intertextuality in Beckett’s work both depends on and significantly complicates our concept of the author.6 This concept of an author constructed through their works has been influential in recent genetic criticism of Beckett’s writing, central to which is the study of intertextual references in the manuscript drafts. Building on H. Porter Abbott’s concept of “autography,” which incorporates various forms of “self-writing” apart from the story of one’s life,7 Édouard Magessa O’Reilly, Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst contend that a picture of the author built upon acts of writing “encompasses the notion of the ‘self’ without taking it for granted. The ‘self’ is not a pregiven. It is always in the process of being written” – and, we might add, of being read.8 This article draws on manuscript research carried out when constructing a digital genetic edition of Beckett’s plays Not I / Pas moi and That Time / Cette fois in order to outline his “intertextual method” as being comprised of different modes of authorial memory. In doing so, I bear in mind Iain Bailey’s reminder that we should “think of what [Beckett’s novel] Murphy calls ‘demented particulars’ as a difficulty posed by Beckett’s writing and a product of the ways in which it is read, York: Continuum, 2006). See also “Intertexts in Beckett’s Work / Intertextes de l’oeuvre de Beckett,” ed. Marius Buning and Sjef Houppermans, special issue, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 3 (1994). 4 Daniela Caselli, Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) 1. 5 Caselli 3. 6 See James Little, “Decomposing the Asylum in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies: Genetic Criticism and the Author,” Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica 60, no. 1 (2021): 65-77. 7 H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996) x. 8 Édouard Magessa O’Reilly, Dirk Van Hulle and Pim Verhulst, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (Brussels: University Press Antwerp / London: Bloomsbury, 2017) 27. Samuel Beckett’s Remembrance of Texts Past 81 and not simply as the material out of which it is composed.”9 In order to tackle the problem of Beckett’s intertextual “demented particulars,” it may be helpful to consider intertextuality as a form of cultural memory.10 Remembering Intertextuality Within the field of memory studies, intertextuality has been seen as contributing to the “ongoing production and reproduction of cultural memory” by giving “new cultural life to old texts.”11 In this sense, “writing is both an act of memory and a new interpretation.”12 Building on the work of Renate Lachmann, Astrid Erll defines the “memory of literature” in terms of both a subjective and objective genitive: in the subjective sense, “earlier texts are ‘remembered’ through intertextual references”; in the objective, “literature is ‘remembered,’ for example through canon formation and the writing of literary histories.”13 It is on the former sense of the term that this article will focus, with the emphasis firmly on the different ways in which an author’s memory of texts past informs the creative process. Writing of the ways in which the published text “remembers” its past versions, Daniel Ferrer speaks of contextual memory (“mémoire du contexte”), through which the text preserves traces of its previous states.14 The example he gives is of a doctored 1948 photo from Czechoslovakia, in which the Communist leader Klement Gottwald wears a hat given to him by his party colleague Vladimír Clementis. When Clementis was found guilty of “anti-state conspiracy against the 9 Iain Bailey, “‘Like a Sweat of Things’: Familiarity, Intertextuality, and Beckett’s Bibles,” Textual Practice 28, no. 1 (2014): 157. Ackerley’s Demented Particulars tracks many of Murphy’s intertextual references. 10 See Michael Riffaterre’s suggestion that we consider literary interpretation not as decoding, but as a form of mnemotechnic. Michael Riffaterre, “Contraintes intertextuelles,” Texte(s) et intertexte(s), ed. Éric Le Calvez and Marie-Claude CanovaGreen in collaboration with Sarah Alyn-Stacey (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994) 53. 11 Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, “Literature and the Production of Cultural Memory: Introduction,” European Journal of English Studies 10, no. 2 (2006): 113. 12 Renate Lachmann, “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature,” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning in collaboration with Sara B. Young (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008) 301. 13 Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B. Young (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan: 2011) 70. See Renate Lachmann, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism, trans. Roy Sellars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 14 “Le texte conserve la trace des états antérieurs.” Daniel Ferrer, Logiques du brouillon: modèles pour une critique génétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011) 110. Ferrer based his analysis on the account that opens Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979). James Little 82 Republic” in 1952,15 his image was airbrushed from the photo. But the hat on Gottwald’s head is a reminder of the photo’s previous version.16 Ferrer goes on to define this “memoire du contexte” as really consisting of a “mémoire de l’avanttexte,” that is, of the versions leading up to the published text.17 With regard to Beckett’s work, the dynamism of this “mémoire du contexte” has been shown through the study of his drafts. Georgina Nugent-Folan uses the term “remémoration” – drawn from the manuscripts of Beckett’s Compagnie, where it is used to translate “recall”18 – to describe the creative process behind his filtering of “autographic events,” scenes from his life revised over the course of the bilingual writing process. Her analysis is worth quoting at length: Beckett’s writerly practice throughout Company, his stoking of the echo over and above its source or origin, together with his subsequent attempts to belie or mask the source’s status as source, mimics on a smaller scale the looping relationship between the English and French versions of the text. But beyond that, this impossibilising of our access to the source event is itself a textual dramatisation of the act of recollection in and of itself: of remembering, of re-calling, or later, as we will see in relation to the French text, of the “remémoration” of an event [...] that is now inaccessible beyond the realm of memory.19 This “mask[ing of] the source’s status as source” has overlaps with what has been referred to as “negative intertextuality,” “the phenomenon that an external source acts upon the genesis of a work of art, but remains out of sight in the published version.”20 Such modes of textual “forgetting” chime with Paul Ricœur’s idea that 15 Jaroslav Pánek, Oldřich Tůma et al., A History of the Czech Lands, trans. Justin Quinn, Petra Key and Lea Bennis (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2011) 513. 16 Ferrer 109. 17 Ferrer 124. 18 Georgina Nugent-Folan, The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Company / Compagnie (Brussels: University Press Antwerp / London: Bloomsbury, 2021) 36. 19 Nugent-Folan, Making of Company / Compagnie 26-27. 20 See “Call for Papers: GENESIS – Oxford 2020,” https://armacad.info/university-ofoxford--2019-12-01--cfp-genesis-oxford-conference-15-17-september-2020-uk. This idea is built on Adorno’s concept of a “negative dialectic,” in that it does not “come to rest in itself, as if it were total,” but requires debate in a community of readers. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 2004) 406. See Dirk Van Hulle, “Stratégies de lecture exogénétiques: approches de l’intertextualité Samuel Beckett’s Remembrance of Texts Past 83 narrative more broadly has a “selective function […] consisting from the outset in a strategy of forgetting as much as in a strategy of remembering [remémoration].”21 From his 1930s research on Freudian psychoanalysis, Beckett was well aware of the dynamic interplay between memory and forgetting in the studies of the human mind, noting from one psychoanalytic textbook that the discipline was more interested in instances of forgetting than those of remembering.22 It is such interwoven dynamics that will be explored through the following case studies. Drawing on three authors whose work had significant impact on Beckett’s poetics, I will attempt to distinguish the different forms of authorial memory involved in incorporating their work into Beckett’s late theatre writing, a period which marked his “increasing reticence towards making overt intertextual references.”23 (Mis)remembering Shakespeare “What are those wonderful lines[?],” asks Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. Emulating her author (see below), she goes on to misquote a line from Hamlet.24 However, in spite of such instances of crumbling memory, Shakespeare refuses to be fully forgotten in Beckett’s oeuvre. For Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, such is Beckett’s engagement with his predecessor playwright, from his student reading onwards, that “it is difficult to overestimate the importance of William Shakespeare on [sic] Beckett’s work.”25 Due to his ubiquity in Eurocentric literary culture, Shakespeare presents a compelling case study when it comes to examining how an intertext is remembered in Beckett’s work. invisible,” Genesis 51 (2020): 43. Nugent-Folan goes on to apply her concept of textual “remémoration” to Beckett’s use of intertextual references. 21 Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006) 85; Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 2000) 103. 22 TCD MS 10971/8/8. See Ernest Jones, Papers on Psycho-analysis (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1923) 131. 23 Nugent-Folan 153. 24 “What are those wonderful lines – [wipes one eye] – woe woe is me – [wipes the other] – to see what I see.” Samuel Beckett, Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts (London: Faber and Faber, 2010) 7. “O woe is me / T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see” (Hamlet, III.i.161-62). Unless otherwise stated, all Shakespeare references are to The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001). References are to act, scene and line. 25 Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 25. James Little 84 Discussing Beckett’s creative use of the Bible, an intertext which, like the works of Shakespeare, has been deemed pervasive in Beckett’s oeuvre,26 Bailey points to a problem in relying on the concept of authorial “familiarity” to structure archival analyses of intertexts Beckett knew since childhood. On the one hand, the archive “promises to make familiarity empirically demonstrable and also subject to criteria of accuracy – up to a point.” We might, he points out, search in Beckett’s library for marked texts he used in his work, though finding matches in this way is actually quite rare, as we will see below. On the other hand, Bailey contends, “familiarity is what subsists in the gaps between archival markings,” as a means of covering critical terrain untouched by the archive.27 The key phrase in Bailey’s analysis is “up to a point”: the present archival analysis does not claim to make the entirety of Beckett’s engagement with Shakespeare “empirically demonstrable,” even in the limited instances it discusses. But it can help us to temper and sharpen our claims about the various forms of intertextual memory at work in Beckett’s oeuvre. The instability of intertextual memory is brought to the fore in Beckett’s 1984 short theatre fragment about a couple reading a Shakespeare sonnet: Come & read to me. What? That Shakespeare sonnet we once so used to loved. You mean “No longer weep ...” What? (P.) No longer what? Weep. (P.) [“]No longer weep ...”28 Or rather, this is a play about a couple trying to read a Shakespeare sonnet, as they cannot remember it fully: I can’t remember. have forgotten. 26 “Today every Beckett student knows his literary allegiances – the Bible and Dante above all; Shakespeare, Pascal, Proust, Joyce, Fontane, Hölderlin.” Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett’s Theater (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) 143. See the discussion of part of this statement in Iain Bailey, “Samuel Beckett, Intertextuality, and the Bible,” PhD dissertation (University of Manchester, 2010). 27 Bailey, “‘Like a Sweat of Things’” 143. 28 Samuel Beckett’s “Stirrings Still” / “Soubresauts” and “Comment dire” / “what is the word”: A Digital Genetic Edition, ed. Dirk Van Hulle and Vincent Neyt (Brussels: University Press Antwerp, 2011), www.beckettarchive.org, UoR MS 2934, 02r. Samuel Beckett’s Remembrance of Texts Past 85 We used to know it by heart. One would say the first quatrain, then the other the second. Then the one the next ... what do you call it. third. Then the other the geegee29 Intertextual memory here has three distinctive features: it is communal, with the text only being remembered with the help of an interlocutor; it takes place without reference to a printed edition; and, crucially, it is fallible. As Bailey points out, Beckett does something similar in the opening scenes of Waiting for Godot, when Estragon is asked by Vladimir if he has read the Bible: “The Bible ... [He reflects.] I must have taken a look at it.”30 In both the Shakespeare fragment and the discussion of the Bible in his breakthrough play, Beckett’s characters are as much engaged in forgetting their textual sources as they are in remembering them, throwing into doubt any model of authorial intertextuality that would claim to provide certainty about the author’s engagement with their intertexts. But this does not mean we should give up trying to map out the different ways these intertexts function in his work and react like the silent Auditor of Not I, standing downstage from Mouth in a black djellaba, who responds each time Mouth violently refuses the first-person pronoun by shrugging his shoulders in “a gesture of helpless compassion.”31 Instead, as Bailey suggests, we should try to accommodate “the speculative aspect – the unfalsifiable and undocumented aspect” into our analysis when tracking Beckett’s use of intertextual material.32 As we will now see, this aspect is highlighted by Shakespeare’s appearance in the drafts of Not I. Shakespeare Rings a Bell Estragon is not the only Beckett character to (mis)remember his canonical texts. From Krapp’s Last Tape to Happy Days to ... but the clouds ..., Beckett’s characters are deeply involved in the memory (and forgetting) of works from the European literary canon. In Not I, the memories of the sole speaker Mouth are firmly focussed on her own past, though she too evokes Shakespeare. In the following 29 Samuel Beckett’s “Stirrings Still,” UoR MS 2934, 02r. 30 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 2010) 8. See Bailey, “‘Like a Sweat of Things’” 155. In the French text, Estragon responds to Vladimir’s question with a recollection of the maps of the Holy Land: “Possible. Je me rappelle les cartes de la Terre sainte.” Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot (Paris: Minuit, 1973) 14. 31 Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 2009) 83. Hereafter referred to as KLT in the text. 32 Bailey, “Beckett, Intertextuality, and the Bible” 92. James Little 86 instance, she reflects on the functioning of a brain – probably her own – as it remembers an April morning in a field: but the brain still ... still sufficiently ... oh very much so! ... at this stage ... in control ... under control ... to question even this ... for on that April morning ... so it reasoned ... that April morning ... she fixing with her eye ... a distant bell ... as she hastened towards it ... fixing it with her eye ... lest it elude her ... had not all gone out ... all that light ... of itself ... without any ... any ... on her part (KLT 88) As a repeat reader and audience member of Not I, Mouth’s mention of a “distant bell” never set any intertextual alarm bells ringing for me. But by taking into account Beckett’s manuscripts as part of his work, a “genetic reader” can find pertinent Shakespearean resonances in this passage.33 Cowslips are mentioned early in the genesis of Not I, but it is only in the third typescript that Shakespeare enters the picture. In the first manuscript draft, Beckett wrote of the remembered character “fixing with her eye ... a distant cowslip ... x as she hastened towards it.”34 In the third typescript, Beckett tried some alternatives: “...a distant cowslip flower bloom fxxx bell (in a cowslip bell I lie)...as she hastened towards it....”35 Having first written the words “flower” and “bloom,” it is hard not to imagine James Joyce’s Ulysses coming to Beckett’s mind, as Joyce’s character Leopold Bloom has the penname Henry Flower. But it is Shakespeare’s work which resonates in the change from “cowslip” to the less specific “bell” (KLT 88).36 In the margin of his typescript, Beckett wrote a line from The Tempest, a play which he had read as a Senior Freshman in Trinity College and which is alluded to at many points in his oeuvre, such as the letter which opened this article.37 The 33 Jean-Michel Rabaté, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 196. 34 EM1, 03r. The notation “EM1” refers to the first English manuscript of Not I, available in Samuel Beckett’s Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas: A Digital Genetic Edition, ed. James Little and Vincent Neyt (Brussels: University Press Antwerp, 2022), www.beckettarchive.org. All further manuscript references are to this edition. 35 ET3, 02r. “ET3” refers to the third English typescript of Not I. 36 This is in line with Beckett’s ‘vaguening’ of his texts during the drafting process. See Rosemary Pountney, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama, 1956-76 (Gerrards Cross and Totowa, NJ: Colin Smythe / Barnes and Noble Books, 1988) 149. 37 John Pilling, A Samuel Beckett Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 9. References to The Tempest are found in Beckett’s Proust, “Ding-Dong,” “Yellow,” “Echo’s Samuel Beckett’s Remembrance of Texts Past 93 The first example of Proustian vocabulary comes when Beckett was still writing the English text. On a list of notes at the front of his fifth English typescript, he wrote “edge – orée,”61 probably referring to the opening of B’s monologue: on the stone together in the sun on the stone at the edge of the little wood and as far as eye could see the wheat turning yellow vowing every now and then you loved each other (KLT 99; emphasis added) Proust too refers to the edge of a wood, in a passage where the narrator Marcel observes the gaze of another upon a group of young girls in Paris: Çà et là, entre les arbres, à l’entrée de quelque café, une servante veillait comme une nymphe à l’orée d’un bois sacré, tandis qu’au fond trois jeunes filles étaient assises à côté de l’arc immense de leurs bicyclettes posées à côté d’elles, comme trois immortelles accoudées au nuage ou au coursier fabuleux sur lesquels elles accomplissaient leurs voyages mythologiques.62 [Here and there, among the trees, at the entrance to some cafe, a waitress was watching like a nymph on the edge of a sacred grove, while beyond her three girls were seated by the sweeping arc of their bicycles that were stacked beside them, like three immortals leaning against the clouds or the fabulous coursers upon which they perform their mythological journeys.]63 The question is whether the appearance of “orée” in the manuscripts of That Time counts as a Proustian reference, or whether Beckett was simply drawing on a French term frequently used to describe the edge of a wood or forest.64 There is no evidence from Beckett’s library to back up the claim that this is a Proustian ALA-1.html, tp. These editions are recorded in the library’s Accessions Record as having arrived on 18 July 1973. With many thanks to Guy Baxter, James Knowlson and John Pilling for their help in tracking the acquisition history of these volumes. 61 ET5, 01r. 62 Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, Vol. 3, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié in collaboration with Antoine Compagnon et Pierre-Edmond Robert (Paris: Gallimard, 2011) 675; emphasis added. 63 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor, rev. D.J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 2003) 5:220; emphasis added. 64 Le Petit Robert, iPad application, version 3.1 (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert / Sejer, 2016). James Little 94 intertext, so the passage can be regarded as yet another “memotext” (especially since, as outlined above, Beckett’s copies of the Recherche were already in Reading when he wrote That Time). Nevertheless, he did mark the account of Albertine’s time with Marcel in the “petit bois” at Balbec with a long pencil line, and a “little wood” does turn up in B’s monologue, as a place where Listener spent time with his imagined lover (KLT 99, 103).65 Moreover, in Beckett’s French translation, this scene is referred to as taking place “à l’orée du petit bois,” strengthening the Proustian resonances by bringing together the two phrases.66 Another piece of Proustian vocabulary crops up in Beckett’s note on how the three voices of That Time should overlap: Moments of one and the same voice A B C relay one another without solution of continuity – apart from the two 10-second breaks. Yet the switch from one to another must be clearly faintly perceptible. If threefold source and context prove insufficient to produce this effect it should be assisted mechanically (e.g. threefold pitch). (KLT 97; emphasis added) As Pascale Sardin-Damestoy points out, the phrase highlighted above is a Gallicism which directly translates “sans solution de continuité.”67 But it may again be something that Beckett drew directly from the Recherche. While speaking of the posthumous apparition of his grandmother as he bends to buckle his shoe, Marcel notes that she appears from the past as if time consisted of a series of different and parallel lines “sans solution de continuité,” a phrase Beckett marked in his edition of Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe.68 Although Beckett did not have his Proust volumes to hand while writing the play, the phrase does recur in his earlier essay on Proust (republished by John Calder in 1965), where he uses it to describe how Marcel’s memory of his grandmother invades the present moment “without any solution of continuity.”69 Either Beckett had the phrase in mind due to the recent republication of his Proust essay or this is a memotext similar to the “cowslip bell” passage discussed above. 65 https://www.beckettarchive.org/library/PRO-ALA-10.html 235. 66 Samuel Beckett, Cette fois (Paris: Minuit, 1978) 8. 67 Pascale Sardin-Damestoy, Samuel Beckett: auto-traducteur ou l’art de l’“empêchement” (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2020) 22 (eBook). 68 https://www.beckettarchive.org/library/PRO-ALA-8.html 178. 69 Beckett, Proust 41. Samuel Beckett’s Remembrance of Texts Past 95 James Knowlson claims that Beckett had “an astounding, perhaps even a photographic, visual memory,” and was able to recall details from individual paintings “he had seen many years, even decades before.”70 A passage from his “German Diaries,” written during his tour of Germany in 1936-1937, indicates that he thought of visual art as having an extended echo in the mind of the viewer, similar to that produced by the performing arts. In an entry for 19 November 1936, Beckett mentioned that upon seeing Emil Nolde’s painting Christus und die Kinder, he felt the desire to “spend a long time before it, and play it over and over again like the record of a quartet.”71 It is possible that he remembered literary works in a similar way. Stephen Stacey points out that Knowlson’s claim about the author’s excellent memory “has implications beyond Beckett’s engagement with visual art; opening up, as it does, the possibility that the various notebooks and workbooks that have survived represent only a small part of the material upon which Beckett was capable of drawing in his writing.”72 What we have seen so far indicates that Beckett’s intertexts may have had a similar echo in his mind to the artworks he saw in Germany, facilitating the recall of literary works as memotexts without a printed edition. That Time in Joyce’s Shoes There are other ways of showing admiration for an author’s work than leaving reading traces in their books. Famously, Beckett’s hero-worship for James Joyce extended to wearing shoes which were too narrow for him as a young man in Paris, in emulation of his compatriot’s footwear.73 Yet, in spite of the large number of books by and about Joyce in Beckett’s library, these editions are not heavily marked.74 This is an excellent example of how empirical evidence (marks in an author’s editions) is not at all a straightforward indicator of a reader’s interest in a writer. Beckett addressed the problem of memory being inversely proportional to the degree of importance accorded to a text in a letter to Georges Duthuit on 2 August 1948: “The lines that matter are those one forgets. The others one quotes 70 John Haynes and James Knowlson, Images of Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 58. 71 Quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame (London: Bloomsbury, 1997) 235. 72 Stephen Stacey, “Beckett and French, 1906-1946: A Study,” PhD dissertation (Trinity College Dublin, 2018) 356. I would like to thank Stephen Stacey for sharing his unpublished work with me. 73 Knowlson, Damned to Fame 101. 74 Van Hulle and Nixon 38-39. James Little 96 easily and incorrectly.”75 Though Beckett here is not talking about reading traces in his library, these lines do suggest an awareness of the fact that accurate memory does not necessarily denote intertextual importance. If, in light of theories such as the “extended mind,”76 we extend our working concept of authorial memory and consider an author’s library to be part of their material memory bank, then we can think of the paucity of reading traces in his copies of Joyce’s work as evidence of his epistolary theory outlined to Duthuit. The lines that matter to Beckett seem often not to be stored in the material memory traces of his library, but are instead remembered in other ways. Another example of intertextual “non-marginalia” occurs in That Time’s description of clothing. Voice C speaks of Listener’s time as a derelict old man, wandering from one public institution to another in order to gain shelter from the inclement weather. Wearing “the old green greatcoat” used by many of the downand-out characters in Beckett’s oeuvre (KLT 100), he slinks from art gallery to public library, eventually ending up in a post office. As Julie Bates has shown, the greatcoat has autobiographical resonances for this author, being used by Beckett “to house and evoke memories of his father.”77 And C does mention that Listener’s greatcoat was one “your father left you” (KLT 103), making this a melancholy object of parental affection. Shoes, however, function differently in the play. Rather than signalling imagined proximity to a lost paternal figure, Beckett’s manuscripts show how his choice of footwear in the play deliberately avoided explicit reference to one of his closest literary forefathers. The allusion in question occurs when C describes what the attendants wore as Listener sat huddled, drying off in the art gallery. At first, these items were “slippers,” later changed to “pantofles.”78 On his fifth typescript, Beckett added a Joycean reference before striking it out and replacing it with the published word: “pantofles galoshes shufflers.”79 Here, as in the brief appearance of “bloom” and “flower” in the manuscripts of Not I, Beckett considers a noun which would resonate strongly with Joyce’s work. In “The Dead,” galoshes are worn by Gabriel Conroy, who tries to get his wife Gretta to use them in order to protect her feet from the winter snow. Gretta complains to her aunts: 75 The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 2, 1941-1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 91. 76 Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” The Extended Mind, ed. Richard Menary (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2010) 27-42. 77 Julie Bates, Beckett’s Art of Salvage: Writing and Material Imagination, 1932-1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 81. 78 EM, 09r; ET1, 05r. 79 ET5, 02r. See KLT 100. Samuel Beckett’s Remembrance of Texts Past 97 – Goloshes! said Mrs Conroy. That’s the latest. Whenever it’s wet underfoot I must put on my goloshes. To-night even, he wanted me to put them on, but I wouldn’t. The next thing he’ll buy me will be a diving suit.80 In a story centred around the death of Gretta’s childhood lover from consumption, this passage speaks of her defiant independence from the accoutrements of middle-class modernity. That Beckett would even have considered putting galoshes on the feet of his gallery attendants is noteworthy, given that they work indoors – an area where even Gabriel Conroy takes off his beloved shoe-coverings.81 On this evidence, it appears that Beckett was – at one point – willing to force these unlikely shoes onto his attendants’ feet, but then decided against it. As in the “cowslip bell” instance discussed above, Beckett’s copies of Dubliners contain no reading traces.82 However, as a close reader of Joyce’s work, Beckett would almost certainly have been aware of this vocabulary’s resonance for his readers. Here again, “negative intertextuality” is at play, with the manuscripts showing the mark left by Joyce’s galoshes, covered over by Beckett in the published text, but still peeking through the textual snowdrift in the drafts he donated to the University of Reading. We can better understand the (hidden) resonance of this example by looking at another passage in Beckett’s work where Gabriel Conroy’s galoshes leave a much clearer intertextual trail. In Embers – a radio play heavily concerned with shoes and their sounds – the visiting doctor Holloway is described as wearing galoshes, protecting his feet from the winter snow on the ground. The narrator, Henry, describes the “crooked trail of Holloway’s galoshes,” immediately followed by the words “Vega in the Lyre very green. [Pause.] Vega in the Lyre very green. [Pause.].”83 This remarkable astronomical reference echoes the catechistic “Ithaca” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, which describes Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom watching a shooting star crossing the night sky: 80 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004) 378. Though Joyce uses the non-standard “goloshes,” Beckett goes with the standard “galoshes.” 81 See Joyce, Dubliners 376. 82 https://www.beckettarchive.org/library/JOY-DUB-1.html, https://www.beckettarchive.org/library/JOY-DUB-2.html, https://www.beckettarchive.org/library/JOY-DUB-3.html, https://www.beckettarchive.org/library/JOY-DUB-5.html. 83 Samuel Beckett, All That Fall and Other Plays for Radio and Screen (London: Faber and Faber, 2009) 37. I would like to thank Pim Verhulst for alerting me to this passage and its Joycean intertext. James Little 98 What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed? A star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the Tress of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo.84 Ulysses takes place on 16 June 1904, a time of year when the star Vega is visible in the summer sky of the northern hemisphere, as part of the constellation Lyra. Given the Irish setting of Embers, this makes it very likely that Henry’s wintertime description of Vega describes the trail of footsteps in the ground, rather than the star itself. As an intertextual trail, the path back to Joyce is emphasized by the pauses and repetition of the phrase, and the proximity of galoshes only reinforces this interpretation. This is the opposite intertextual strategy to what we find in That Time: whereas Beckett’s early writing showed his inclination to follow in Joyce’s footsteps, and Embers seems to give us a critique of that practice through its on-the-nose signalling of Joycean intertextuality, That Time provides a clear example of “negative intertextuality.” In the case of the deleted “galoshes,” we can see Joyce’s influence on the attendants’ footwear through an examination of the drafts, but this resonance is deliberately withheld in the published text. Conclusion The intertexts examined above each resonate differently within their given textual setting: the Shakespearean memotext of the “cowslip bell” rings out in one particular part of Mouth’s memories, with the reference to Sonnet 30 following closely afterwards. In an instance of “negative intertextuality,” these intertextual traces are kept out of sight in the published text and, apart from the Sycorax-like “hag” elsewhere in the play, Shakespeare does not seem to shape this play to the same extent that Proustian memory does That Time. Though I could not identify any irrefutable intertextual links to Proust’s Recherche, the accretion of Proustian echoes indicates to me that this novel provided crucial “bits of pipe” as Beckett composed his later play. Finally, by comparing the deleted Joycean “galoshes” in That Time to a similar piece of vocabulary in Embers, we again saw the degree to which Beckett uses “negative intertextuality” to cover his tracks. To my mind, Joyce is not as strong a presence in the genesis of That Time – the reference to 84 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage Books, 1986) 577. Samuel Beckett’s Remembrance of Texts Past 99 “galoshes” seems more incidental than the Proustian echoes identified above. Of course, other readers may wish to dispute these interpretations by examining the Not I and That Time manuscripts, now available on the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project website.85 The study of authorial manuscripts serves to re-invigorate the study of intertextuality, not shut it down within a limited range of interpretations. Key to this is the concept of the author as reader of their own work – whether this be drafts or published editions – during which some resonances may occur to them for the first time. For instance, when discussing biblical echoes in That Time’s phrase “the passers pausing to gape” (KLT 103, 105) with actor Klaus Herm in the Schiller-Theater, Beckett remarked: “that is from the Bible.” Herm identified the Gospel: “Yes, from St Luke’s Gospel.” Beckett replied: “I looked it up, but I didn’t find it, aha, Luke.”86 Likewise, when inserting a quotation from Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Fragment von Hyperion” in the production notebook of That Time, it seems that Beckett was reflecting on the textual mood of the play, responding as a reader with the play’s production in mind.87 Similarly, it is possible that Beckett only saw the reference to The Tempest’s “cowslip’s bell” when reading through the drafts himself, though it is hard to be certain about this. And this would have implications for the Proustian resonances in That Time, which could have appeared unbeknownst to the author, as “bits of pipe” which were used unconsciously in the manner described in Beckett’s opening letter to Knowlson. An author searching for and identifying intertextual references in his own work provides us with a quite dynamic model of intertextuality, in which an author’s familiarity with the intertextual resonances of their own work is by no means a fixed certainty. Using an author’s archive opens up anew questions regarding the criteria used to make the case for authorial familiarity with intertexts. As Stacey warns: Such archival resources [...] represent an important source, but also a partial one: To draw intelligently upon them is, undoubtedly, to strengthen the validity of our readings; to restrict ourselves to what they tell us, 85 There, intertexts are marked by editorial notes which outline the degree of interpretative certainty with regard to a given intertextual link. 86 Quoted in Walter D. Asmus, “Practical Aspects of Theatre, Radio and Television: Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett’s That Time and Footfalls at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin,” trans. Helen Watanabe, Journal of Beckett Studies 2 (1977): 93. 87 UoR MS 1976, 06r, reproduced in Samuel Beckett, The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 4, The Shorter Plays, ed. S.E. Gontarski (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Grove Press, 1999) 389. James Little 100 however, is to cut ourselves off from the possibility of unexpected discoveries and, in so doing, immeasurably weaken our potential to engage with the full depth of Beckett’s writing. When reading Beckett, in other words, we should remain open to finding traces of his familiarity with authors and works that have left no other archival record.88 What I have argued above is that Beckett’s familiarity with Shakespeare is indicated by the inaccuracy of his textual memory – memorizing these texts by heart may have made it unnecessary to check them in a printed edition. Likewise, the majority of instances discussed above could not be linked via reading traces in the author’s library, but had to proceed using other evidence (from the archive and beyond). By taking into account such instances of “non-marginalia,” we can sharpen our image of authorial intertextuality, as well as challenging the idea that archival research need necessarily remain within the bounds of “reductive empiricism.”89 As Van Hulle points out with regard to the gaps in Beckett’s library, “no matter how conscious we are of the lacunae, this awareness and the resulting caution are no reasons to withhold the information we find” by studying an author’s archive.90 It is now up to other readers to make their own cases for links to other intertexts, showing how they shape the work of literature in cultural memory. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbott, H. Porter. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Ackerley, C.J. Demented Particulars: The Annotated “Murphy.” Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Ackerley, C.J. Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated “Watt.” Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 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