Beckett’s Dedalus: Dialogical Engagements with Joyce in Beckett’s Fiction (review)

In Beckett’s Dedalus, P. J. Murphy argues that, contrary to prevailing critical opinion, Joyce’s influence on Beckett extended well beyond early writing like Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written 1932) and Murphy (1938). In his introduction, Murphy states that “Most Beckett criticism has preemptively determined that Joyce’s influence as a significant factor ended well before the famous Trilogy, even if there is considerable disagreement over when exactly such ‘influence’ need no longer be regarded as important in the development of Beckett’s writing” (11). Murphy here establishes both thesis and tone for what follows: a startling and somewhat belligerent reading of some of Beckett’s major prose in terms of what can only be called an idée fixe.

Murphy’s point of departure—and return—is Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, primarily two central moments: Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic theory in chapter 5 and the vision of the so-called bird girl in chapter 4. According to Murphy, Beckett’s major prose works from 1932 onward in various ways all respond either to Dedalus’s theories of claritas, quidittas, and integritas, or rewrite, ironically or not, the epiphanic vision of sexual beauty: all are deeply, elaborately embedded with allusive traces of A Portrait, the Joyce text (perhaps the text), as Murphy suggests, that had the most influence on Beckett. Murphy thus moves from a reading of an early critical piece “Dante … Bruno. Vico .. Joyce” to “Assumption,” Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, Watt, Mercier and Camier, Molloy (his readings of Malone Dies and The Unnamable are negligible), and finally to a consideration of the posttrilogy Texts for Nothing and the late texts, including the so-called second trilogy.

Murphy’s argument depends absolutely on patterns of allusion, on a recognition of these allusions by the reader. And here is where the major difficulty with Beckett’s Dedalus begins and ends. If it is not terribly difficult to see, or hear, Joyce’s presence in the early writings (on this, all agree), it becomes more so in the later texts. But Murphy is adamant that Joyce is indeed present, organizing the structure of Beckett’s texts, mobilizing possible ways of interpreting them. I find Murphy’s readings unconvincing primarily because I cannot, in the great majority of examples he cites, see the allusion for what Murphy requires it to be. The connections he draws between texts are so elaborately attenuated as to be, in my estimation, of little interpretive value. I will cite some examples. In his reading of the opening sentences of Murphy, Murphy draws a connection between the first two sentences—“‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton’” (95, Murphy’s emphasis)—and a sentence from A Portrait which describes Stephen’s state of mind preceding his vision of the bird girl: “‘His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward’” (95, Murphy’s emphasis). Murphy suggests, after chiding Ackerley for not spotting the allusion in his Demented Particulars, that the “echolalia” of the two phrases (he admits that it is not quite an allusion) draws a connection between the Icarian nature of both characters while, of course, demonstrating how “Joyce is the major figure, literary or otherwise, that Beckett is engaged with here” (96).

In his reading of Watt, a text Joycean it seems largely because Watt’s name refers to the idea of whatness or quidittas in Dedalus’s aesthetic theory, Murphy again cites two sentences, one from Beckett, one from Joyce. In the first, Beckett describes how Arsene looks at Watt: “‘The gentleman gazed long at Watt, and then went away, without a word of explanation’” (141); in the second, Joyce describes the bird girl: “‘Long, long she suffered his gaze...