Echo's Bones. Samuel Beckett
Bones’ is a story about absent fathers and sons, about the afterlife and about the deplorable state of the world, it is hardly surprising that its main literary dialogue is with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. On both a thematic and a verbal level, Hamlet ghosts through ‘Echo’s Bones’.
It is of course impossible to ascertain whether early readers would have ‘shuddered’ with confusion, as Prentice predicted, when reading ‘Echo’s Bones’ as part of More Pricks Than Kicks; or, put differently, whether the story actually ‘belongs’ to that collection. One could argue that Beckett, in the knowledge that he had a contract for the stories, went back to the way of writing he preferred at the time, the exuberant yet enigmatic style of Dream of Fair to Middling Women. In any case, while it is interesting to read ‘Echo’s Bones’ as part of the collection it was intended to conclude, it stands on its own. And we need see it neither as a step toward Beckett’s farewell to Joyce’s accumulative style of writing, by clearing out his store of quotations, nor as an emotionally charged text which – as Walter Draffin’s book is described in the More Pricks story ‘What a Misfortune’ – was simply ‘a mere dump for whatever he could not get off his chest in the ordinary way’ (133). The literary merit of ‘Echo’s Bones’ is evident; moreover, it is a vital document, which represents the missing link in Beckett’s development during the 1930s, and suggestively anticipates the postwar texts, stating a conundrum which will be restated in Waiting for Godot and beyond: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ ‘Echo’s Bones’ allows us to witness a young writer at ease yet at odds with the cultural contexts of his time, attempting to forge a literary path.
—Mark Nixon, 2014
NOTE ON THE TEXT
Samuel Beckett’s story ‘Echo’s Bones’ survives in one typescript, held at the Rauner Library at Dartmouth College, and a carbon copy held in the A. J. Leventhal Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The two texts are thus identical, but there are differences in Beckett’s manuscript corrections. The Dartmouth typescript (given by Beckett to the critic Laurence Harvey in 1962) has all of the corrections made to the Austin copy, but also has further corrections, and thus forms the base text for this edition. Underlined words have been retained.
Typographical errors that remain in Beckett’s typescript have been silently corrected, but more substantive changes are listed below; Beckett’s manuscript corrections, if of interest, are discussed in the annotations.
[p. 7]: The word ‘the’ has been added to the sentence ‘But her first impression was confirmed by the absence of any shadow [. . .]’.
[p. 8]: The word ‘a’ has been added to the sentence ‘Now the fact of the matter is that a personal shadow is like happiness [. . .]’.
[p. 9]: In footnotes 1 and 2, Beckett writes ‘Cf.’ and ‘Cp.’ respectively; this has been standardised by using ‘Cf.’ in both instances.
[p. 12]: A third point has been added to the ellipses at the end of the sentence ‘Now if there should turn out to be a Voltigeur in this assortment . . . !’. Beckett uses both two- and three-point ellipses before other punctuation in this manner; this has been standardised throughout the text to use three.
[p. 13]: Beckett’s spelling of ‘exageration’ has, in both instances the word occurs, been changed to ‘exaggeration’.
[p. 14]: Beckett initially wrote ‘mentioned that he was bemired bemired with sins’; it is unlikely, if not impossible, that he intended the repetition, so one occurrence of the word ‘bemired’ has been omitted.
[p. 20]: In citing Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying, Beckett writes ‘Duke of Ebenberg’ instead of Duke of Ebersberg; this error has been corrected here.
[p. 32]: The word ‘considerable’ has been changed to ‘considerably’.
[p. 36]: Beckett’s reference on this page and on p. 97 to ‘page 7, paragraph 2’ refers to a passage in his own typescript, rather than this edition.
[p. 41]: The word ‘been’ has been added to the sentence ‘“I dassay my life was a derogation and an impùdence” said Belacqua “which it was my duty, nay should have been my pleasure, to nip in the wombbud”’.
[p. 42]: The sentence ‘There you glump like a fluke in a tup and what to know from what’ has been changed to ‘There you glump like a fluke in a tup and want to know from what’.
[p. 47]: The word ‘be’ has been added to the sentence ‘“In the event of dispute” said Doyle, “it might be a wise thing to appoint an arbitrator”’.
ECHO’S BONES
The dead die hard, they are trespassers on the beyond, they must take the place as they find it, the shafts and manholes back into the muck, till such time as the lord of the manor incurs through his long acquiescence a duty of care in respect of them. Then they are free among the dead by all means, then their troubles are over, their natural troubles. But the debt of nature, that scandalous post-obit on one’s own estate, can no more be discharged by the mere fact of kicking the bucket than descent can be made into the same stream twice. This is a true saying.
At least it can be truly said of Belacqua who now found himself up and about in the dust of the world, back at his old games in the dim spot, on so many different occasions that he sometimes wondered if his lifeless condition were not all a dream and if on the whole he had not been a great deal deader before than after his formal departure, so to speak, from among the quick. No one was more willing than himself to admit that his definite individual existence had in some curious way been an injustice and that this tedious process of extinction, its protracted faults of old error, was the atonement imposed on every upstart into animal spirits, each in the order of time. But this did not make things any more pleasant or easy to bear. It occurred to him one day as he sat bent double on a fence like a casse-poitrine in delicious rêverie and puffed away at his Romeo and Juliet that perhaps if he had been cremated rather than inhumed directly he would have been less liable to revisit the vomit. But happily for all of us this thought was too egregious to detain him long. He tried all he knew, without shifting his position however, to conceive of his exuviae as preserved in an urn or other receptacle in some kind person’s sanctum or as drifting about like a cloud of randy pollen, but somehow he could not quite bring it off, this simple little flight. Was it possible that his imagination had perished in the torture chamber, that non-smoking compartment? That would indeed be something to be going on with, that would be what a Madden prizeman, his eyes out on stalks like a sentinel-crab’s with zeal and excitement, would call a step in the right direction.
To state it then fairly fully once and for all, Belacqua is a human, dead and buried, restored to the jungle, yes really restored to the jungle, completely exhausted, conscious of his shortcomings, sitting on this fence, day in day out, having this palpitation, picking his nose between cigars, suffering greatly from exposure. This is he and the position from which he ventures, to which he is even liable to return after the fiasco, in which he is installed for each dose of expiation of great strength, from which he is caught up each time a trifle better, dryer, less of a natural snob. These predicates do not cover him, no number of them could. If as dense tissue of corporeal hereditaments – ha! – he was predicateless, how much more so then as spook? But cover they do the mean, the least presentable, aspect of his cruel reversion, three scenes from which, the first, the central and the last, we make bold to solicit as likely material for this fagpiece, this little triptych.
To begin then at the beginning, he felt himself nodding in the grey shoals of angels, his co-departed, that thronged the womb-tomb, distinctly he felt himself lapsing from a beatitude of sloth that was infinitely smoother than oil and softer than pumpkins, he found himself fighting in vain against the hideous torpor and the grit and glare of his lids on the eyeballs so long lapped in gloom, and