Echo's Bones. Samuel Beckett
Dream of Fair to Middling Women. But if the story is rather wild and undisciplined, it is also quite brilliantly so, especially in the flaunting yet withholding of its ‘shabby mysteries’ (‘Draff’, 183). The imaginative playfulness mixes styles and sources, all of whichgesture towards Joyce but ultimately establish something rather more distinctly Beckettian.
Beckett obviously struggled to write the story. His correspondence with MacGreevy testifies to the fact that his heart was not really in the book as a whole (‘But it is all jigsaw and I am not interested’), viewing More Pricks Than Kicks as a concession to the marketplace, and in terms of literary merit inferior to what he had tried to do with the novel Dream. Moreover, Beckett’s feelings about his creative activities must have been complicated by the death of his father only a few months earlier (on 26 June 1933), which may have contributed to his decision to abandon the kind of allusive, fragmentary and ultimately Joycean writing that might fulfil his own artistic criteria but would not sustain a living. As a result, Beckett’s struggle to write the story is evident across the surface of the text. The characters themselves are ostensibly trying to keep a story going even as it tries at every turn to sabotage them from doing so. More than once, for example, the text obstructs itself, as when Lord Gall ‘could not go on with what he was saying’.
Naturally enough, the largest challenge facing Beckett in writing this ‘fagpiece’, as the story calls itself, was how to ensure its consistency within the collection as a whole. He must have decided that it was easier to resurrect Belacqua from the dead and to add a story at the end of the book than to upset the unity, if there is one, of More Pricks Than Kicks by inserting one at an earlier point. Throughout the volume, Belacqua negotiates a world of love and death, and in ‘Echo’s Bones’ is faced with an afterlife. Even before his untimely demise during a surgical operation in the story ‘Yellow’, Belacqua was described (in Dream) as a ‘horrible border-creature’ (123), a state of being reinforced in ‘Echo’s Bones’ by his opening position, seated on a fence. Although a ghost, and casting no shadow, Belacqua is very much a corporeal entity, brought back to life in order to atone for his narcissism, his solipsism and for being an ‘indolent bourgeois poltroon’ (174) in the previous stories, indolent like his namesake in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
The story self-referentially calls itself a ‘triptych’, and it is indeed a piece in three movements, but whose panels barely make up a whole. The first part tells the story of Belacqua’s resurrection and his encounter with the prostitute Miss Zaborovna Privet. The second deals with the giant Lord Gall of Wormwood, who is unable to father a son and will lose his estate to the fertile Baron Extravas should he die intestate. Lord Gall thus requests that Belacqua help make him a father; Belacqua complies, and Lady Moll Gall does indeed give birth – to a girl, since this is a shaggy dog story. The story then switches in its final part abruptly to Belacqua sitting on his own headstone, watching the groundsman Doyle rob his grave. Although Doyle had already appeared as an unnamed minor figure in ‘Draff’, the other main characters are new to the collection. But in an attempt to establish a sense of continuity between ‘Echo’s Bones’ and the other stories of More Pricks, Beckett reintroduces various characters despite having killed off several of them (including Belacqua) in the course of the book, as summarised during the opening of ‘Draff’: ‘Then shortly after that they suddenly seemed to be all dead, Lucy of course long since, Ruby duly, Winnie to decency, Alba Perdue in the natural course of being seen home’ (175). Nevertheless, at two points in ‘Echo’s Bones’ a parade of characters passes by in the background. Thus for example the Parabimbis and Caleken Frica make an appearance, as does the (deceased) Alba, one of Belacqua’s love interests, who surfaces surreally in a submarine transporting the souls of the dead. The reintroduction of these characters, who add nothing to the plot, or plots, presumably prompted Prentice’s reference to the ‘wild unfathomable energy of the population’.
As for the ‘horrible and immediate switches of focus’, there is hardly a sentence in ‘Echo’s Bones’ that is not borrowed from one source or another, bearing out Beckett’s own statement that he had ‘put all I knew and plenty that I was better still aware of’ into the story. These references range from the recondite to the popular (Marlene Dietrich, French chansons), and are inscribed in the text both openly and covertly. In compositional terms, ‘Echo’s Bones’ mainly draws on the so-called Dream Notebook; essentially Beckett used those quotations from this artistic notebook that he had not previously used in the novel of the same name or in More Pricks Than Kicks. Either Beckett was grasping around for whatever he had to hand, in his haste to complete this last story for Chatto & Windus, or he was re-enacting a compositional strategy that had been impressed upon the young writer by Joyce’s example. ‘Echo’s Bones’ is, without doubt, more densely allusive, more Joycean, than any of Beckett’s other early writings; both on a verbal and a structural level, it harnesses a range of materials, from science and philosophy to religion and literature. As its title suggests, this is a story made up of echoes, of allusions to multiple cultural contexts. However, as John Pilling has remarked, at times there are so ‘many echoes that they seem to multiply to infinity, and yet they are little more than the bare bonesof material without any overarching purpose to animate’ (Pilling 2011, 104). The switches between the three parts of the story, as well as the references, both erudite and contemporary, seem randomised, all of which is compounded by the shifts in register. The style draws on various literary periods, and the language oscillates between the ornate (‘Archipelagoes ofpollards, spangled with glades’) and the demotic (Dublin slang).
The story structurally and conceptually parallels Dante’s glimpse of the afterlife in the Divine Comedy, and plays on forms of atonement that correspond to the sinner’s actual
vices. The pervasively purgatorial tone is compounded by phrases taken from the Bible, as well as from Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ and Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and Holy Dying (1650–1), the latter a book Beckett was reading at the time he was composing the story. However, and despite the many quotations from St Augustine’s Confessions, this is not a story of punishment, conversion and salvation. Indeed, any possibility of religious salvation for Belacqua is undercut by the litter of sexual puns (learned or schoolboy), lewd jokes, and terminology deriving from flagellation, infertility and homosexuality, especially in the second part of the story. The themes of impotence and sterility are woven through the story, clothed in literary as well as sexual allusions. The threat of reproductive sex, visible across Beckett’s early work, is here deflected humorously, and the general profanity owes much to the Marquis de Sade, whose 120 Days of Sodom Beckett was later to consider translating into English.
The struggle to identify what is at stake in the story is made more difficult by the employment of devices from fantastical, non-realist genres and narratives. One such area is myth; as the title already suggests, Beckett employs the story of Narcissus and Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to frame Belacqua’s ‘post-obit’ journey from living character to echoic voice, until only his bones remain in the final tableau of the story. Beckett also invests the proceedings with a gothic atmosphere, especially in the final section, which plays out in a cemetery. Perhaps more surprising is the use of fairy tale, a form which throws longer shadows over Beckett’s early oeuvre than is usually acknowledged. Blending fairy tales, gothic dreams and classical myth, ‘Echo’s Bones’ is in parts a fantastical story replete with giants, tree-houses, mandrakes, ostriches and mushrooms, drawing on a tradition of folklore as popularised by W. B. Yeats and the Brothers Grimm, for example.
Beckett’s experiments with the fairy tale form, and the general hilarity of the knock-about between Belacqua and Lord Gall, obscure but never quite obliterate the sense of grief and absence that pervades the story. Indeed, as its opening words indicate, ‘the dead die hard’, and Beckett may well have had the death of his cousin and lover, Peggy Sinclair (in May 1933, of tuberculosis), and that of his father (in June 1933), on his mind when writing the story. Indeed, the various clusters of motifs – resurrection, graveyards, legal issues of estates and successions, and the fact that Lord Gall has no son, just as Beckett has no father – suggest a preoccupation too distressing to be stated more directly. Whereas in the literary world of Dream of Fair to Middling Women it was ‘remarkable how everything can be made to end like a fairy tale’, in the real world this was simply not possible.