Samuel Beckett. Eugene Webb
he could move neither backward nor forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him [p. 1].
This abrupt opening suggests the completeness of Belacqua’s absorption in what he is reading. He is studying Dante in preparation for Signorina Ottolenghi’s Italian lesson. His problem is that he can neither understand the argument about the moon-spots, nor abandon it. Like so many of Beckett’s other characters, he has a compulsion to think and to understand, even if what he is trying to understand seems hopelessly trivial to him. From Belacqua’s point of view, the argument is completely invalid, yet he is intent upon unraveling it in order to understand the nature of the satisfaction it conferred upon ‘the misinformed poet.’ He would much rather wrestle with what he considers Dante’s outdated beliefs than read the writings of nineteenth-century political thinkers like Manzoni or Carducci. He feels no concern with society or with the political systems that try to organize it. For Belacqua, man’s real problem is the universe.
The argument to explain the nature of the moon-spots is outdated medieval science, but what is really important is that for Dante, in addition to being a physical phenomenon, they symbolize the mark on the brow of Cain that God put there after the killing of Abel. At issue is the question of the justice of the universe. God, for no apparent reason, preferred the offering of the shepherd, Abel, to that of his brother Cain, the ‘tiller of the ground.’ This problem of the arbitrariness of the universe, choosing some for good fortune and some for disaster, is a recurrent motif in Beckett’s works. One thinks of the two boys who tend Godot’s sheep and goats in Waiting for Godot. The shepherd gets beaten, but the goatherd doesn’t. The story of the two thieves crucified with Christ is another instance of the same theme. It and the story of Abel and Cain are referred to frequently in Beckett’s works. Musing on the arbitrariness of God’s justice, Belacqua imagines what Cain must have thought: ‘It was a mix-up in the mind of the tiller, but that did not matter. It had been good enough for his mother, it was good enough for him’ (p. 5).
It was good enough for Dante, too, but not for Belacqua. Dante had accepted on faith the justice of God’s judgment, just as he accepted Beatrice’s explanation of the moon-spots—‘She had it from God, therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every particular’ (p. 1)—but Belacqua feels constrained by his own sense of justice to protest against both God and Dante. Signorina Ottolenghi speaks at one point of ‘Dante’s rare movements of compassion in Hell’ (p. 15). They are rare, and even those intermittent feelings of pity for the damned are opposed by Dante’s mentor Vergil. Belacqua asks Signorina Ottolenghi how she would translate the pun, ‘Qui vive la pietà quando è ben morta’ (Inferno, XX 28, quoted in More Pricks, p. 16). The word ‘pietà’ means both pity and piety, so the line means, ‘Here lives pity when it should be dead,’ with the extra connotation that may be roughly paraphrased, ‘What kind of piety is this?’ These are the words of Vergil to Dante at the time of one of his rare movements of compassion. ‘Why not piety and pity both, even down below,’ thinks Belacqua, ‘Why not mercy and godliness together?’ (p. 17). But he goes on to think with disgust that there is no mercy either in Dante’s world or his own: ‘He thought of Jonah and the gourd and the pity of a jealous God on Nineveh. And poor McCabe, he would get it in the neck at dawn.’
The story’s criticism of Dante is, however, double-edged. Belacqua’s compassion for suffering humanity is really no deeper than Dante’s. He thinks indignantly of how McCabe, the murderer, will hang, but the thought of the hanging spices his lunch (p. 13). Another symbol of suffering is the lobster that Belacqua is going to eat for dinner. When he picks up the lobster at the fishmonger’s, he does not realize that it is still living and that his aunt will have to boil it alive before they will be able to eat it. Later he is horrified when he and his aunt open the package to find the live lobster shuddering, ‘exposed cruciform’ on the kitchen table. Belacqua’s aunt, however, points out his moral inconsistency: ‘You make a fuss . . . and upset me and then lash into it for your dinner’ (p. 20). Unwilling to give up his dinner, Belacqua tries to persuade himself that the lobster will not suffer much: ‘Well, thought Belacqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all.’ The narrator comments, ‘It is not.’ Belacqua is really no more willing than Dante to risk the consequences of defying the universe.
In this instance, as in many others, Belacqua is something of a poseur. He claims to be a man of compassion, but compassion must not prevent his enjoying his dinner. He claims to be an author without ever having actually published anything. He constantly employs French phrases to display his learning and alludes frequently to his not really very extensive Continental travels: ‘You make great play with your short stay abroad,’ thinks Winnie as he compares the Fingal countryside to Saône et Loire.
Belacqua’s most pretentious pose is that of self-sufficiency. He likes to think of himself as capable of living, as Murphy would later want to, free from worldly attachments in the Cartesian heaven of his mind. ‘He was an indolent bourgeois poltroon,’ says the narrator, ‘very talented up to a point, but not fitted for private life in the best and brightest sense, in the sense to which he referred when he bragged of how he furnished his mind and lived here, because it was the last ditch when all was said and done’ (p. 233).
The narrator does not tell us what Belacqua’s talents are, but his greatest talent seems to be for self-deception. When his pity for the lobster would interfere with his dinner, he can persuade himself that it will not really suffer. When he fails to commit suicide in ‘Love and Lethe’ and ends up copulating instead, the narrator speculates: ‘It will quite possibly be his boast in years to come, when Ruby is dead and he an old optimist, that at least on this occasion, if never before nor since, he achieved what he set out to do . . .’ (p. 138).
The narrator’s attitude toward Belacqua is critical throughout. He says explicitly that Belacqua was ‘an impossible person’ (p. 46) and that he gave him up finally ‘because he was not serious.’ What the narrator probably means by ‘not serious’ is that whereas a person might have many delusions both about himself and about life and yet be honestly mistaken, Belacqua was not honest even with himself. His poses were a substitute for serious wrestling with the real problems of life. All of Beckett’s characters suffer a variety of delusions, but most of them try at least some of the time to see the problems—pain, boredom, compulsions to keep moving and thinking—as clearly as they can and to deal with them directly. Beckett treats all his characters ironically, but Belacqua is the only one who is treated caustically.
Actually, in none of Beckett’s subsequent works is the critical attitude toward the protagonist so strongly pronounced. In More Pricks than Kicks, the narrator calls Belacqua ‘impossible.’ In Murphy, the narrator, although he is quite critical of his central character, also has a certain respect for him. In Watt, the narrator, at least in part of the work, seems to be a fellow inmate of Watt’s in an asylum. Watt is simply an interesting puzzle to him, not an object of moral judgment. In the remaining novels, the trilogy and How It Is, the characters narrate their own stories in the first person; the irony is still there, but the reader is left to detect it for himself from their inconsistencies, evasions, and omissions.
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