Chinese Music as a Narrative Model

This article freshly reveals that Beckett's experiment with metafiction began with his first novel and was inspired by his knowledge of Chinese music, which he obtained from Laloy. From the ways in which Chinese music developed from obeying formula to gaining freedom of expression, Beckett ingeniously perceived a narrative model: just as Chinese music must break free of the theory of liu liu to embrace the freedom of expression, English fiction must reinvent the nineteenth-century realist formula, in which authors like Balzac and Austen exercised rigid control over their plots and characters. The outcome of Beckett's appropriation of Chinese music is a metafictional novel that is usually seen as belonging to postmodern fiction. Yet, Beckett's attack on literary realism does not result in the total negation of the real, but in viewing the real as fundamentally mystic. In this sense, Beckett may be called a "mystic realist". Thus Beckett's own aesthetics emerges in his simultaneous negotiations with realism and postmodernism. These negotiations are also inspired by the legacy of Proust and Joyce: the legacy of inner fiction. Notes 1 Dream hereafter, posthumously published in 1992. All references are to this edition. 2Brienza, Samuel Beckett's New Worlds. For a more recent study of Samuel Beckett's application of metafiction, see Landa. 3I use Brian McHale's distinction between modernist and postmodernist fiction developed in his highly influential book Postmodernist Fiction. As he writes: "I will formulate it as a general thesis about modernist and postmodernist fiction: the dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological. That is, modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as those mentioned by Dick Higgins in my epigraph: 'How can I interpret this world of which I am a part?' The dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. That is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like the ones Dick Higgins calls 'post-cognitive': 'which world is this? What is to be done in it?'" (McHale, 9–10). 4Proust. 5Joyce; Woolf. In John Pilling's view, Beckett's English fiction could have been more popular if written in a more accessible style. As he writes: "Beckett's English fiction, for all its many virtues ... can legitimately be seen as a forced growth: extremely ambitious, courageously experimental, but a little too exotic ... to take root and be widely admired" (Pilling, 18). 6Laloy, La Musique, 21. 7Beckett's admiration for Marcel Proust is clearly articulated in his book-length essay Proust, in which Beckett praises Proust's understanding of reality as being mystic. As Beckett writes: "It [voluntary memory] has no interest in the mysterious element of inattention that colors our most commonplace experiences" (19, emphasis added). Involuntary memory, on the other hand, is like "an unruly magician" performing "the performance of its miracle;" it is like the "music of Vinteuil and the magical prose of Bergotte" (21, emphasis added). Beckett concludes that Proust's entire book (A la recherche du temps perduis) is informed by his entrance into a mystic experience: "Proust has adopted this mystic experience as the Leitmotiv of his composition" (22, emphasis added). Beckett's admiration for James Joyce is reflected in his essay "Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce," in which Beckett highly praises Joyce's stylistic experiment in his work-in-progress later published as Finnegan's Wake, an experiment that conflates form and content. 8Beckett, "Dante ... Bruno,""Whoroscope,"Proust. 9For Beckett's difficulty with his parents about his career, see Knowlson, 81. 10Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks. 11For Beckett's negotiation with the publishing industry concerning the composition and publication of Murphy, see Lin. 12Beckett, Dream, 101. 13Ibid., 120. 14Ibid. 15Ibid. 16Ibid., 45. 17Ibid., 237. 18Ibid., 11. 19Ibid., 18. 20Ibid., 195. Beckett's unflattering portrayal of women in Dream and elsewhere has incurred vehement criticism by feminist critics, who find Beckett's treatment of women troubling. See Ben-Zvi, ed.; Brienza, "Clods, Whores and Bitches"; Bryden, Women. 21Beckett, Dream, 124. 22Ibid., 9. 23bid., 10. 24Laloy, La Musique, 21. For more information on Louis Laloy's relationship to China, see Laloy, Mirror of China, and Louis Laloy on Debussy; see also Priest. 25Beckett, Dream, 10. 26Ibid. 27Ibid., 11. 28Ibid. 29Ibid. 30Ibid., 18. 31Ibid., 112. 32Ibid., 113. 33Ibid. 34Ibid. 35Ibid., 114–15. 36Ibid., 114. 37Ibid., 115. 38Ibid., 117. A lover of music himself and husband of a pianist, Beckett frequently alludes to music in his other texts besides Dream. For comments on Beckett's use of non-Chinese music, see Bryden, Samuel Beckett and Music; Albright; Laws. 39Beckett, Dream, 117. 40Ibid. 41Ibid., 118. 42Ibid., 120. 43Ibid., 125. 44Ibid. 45Dickens. 46Beckett, Dream, 133–4. 47Ibid., 138. 48Ibid., 169. 49Ibid., 169, emphasis added. 50Ibid., 176. 51Ibid. 52Ibid., 177. 53Ibid. 54Ibid. 55Ibid., 178. 56Ibid., 177–8. 57Ibid., 179. 58Swift. 59Taoism is one of the indigenous religions of China and played a role in the assimilation of Buddhism after its transmission to China. The legendary founder of Taoism is the sage Lao Tzu, to whom is attributed the authorship of the classic work the Tao-te-ching (The Book of the Way and its Power), although this probably dates to the 4th to 3rd centuries bce. The Tao or "Way," is the all-embracing matrix of the patterns by which things happen in the world, and it is from this concept that the school derives its name. Taoists generally hold to the ideal of coming to a knowledge or vision of this matrix for a variety of purposes: to see the intricate interconnectedness of all things, to attain long life, to achieve spontaneity in thoughts and actions, to gain supernatural powers, and so on. Such achievements involve finding a balance between the two opposing energies of yin and yang, from whose interaction all phenomena and change arise. These are seen as two complementary facets of the infinite Tao, represented in the yin-yang symbol of a circle with two dots in each half, indicating that yin and yang both contain the seed of their opposite. All opposition and duality can be expressed in terms of yin and yang: for example, yin stands for what is feminine, soft, and receptive; and yang for what is masculine, hard, and dynamic. Taoists seek to harmonize these cosmic energies within themselves by observing and emulating the rhythms of nature, and it is an existential as opposed to an intellectual understanding that they seek. One text in particular, the Chuang-tzu (c. 4th to 2nd centuries bce), presents a thorough critique of language as a means of communicating truth and discursive thought as a mode of knowledge, and counsels direct observation of nature, both in the world and within oneself. This will lead to a calm acceptance of the circumstances of one's life and the inevitability of one's death, and a joyous spontaneity from day to day. 60Quoted in Giles, 63. 61Balzac; Swift. 62Beckett, Dream, 235. 63Ibid., 238. 64Ibid., 240. 65Ibid. 66Ibid. 67Ibid., 241. 68I have noted that critics do not agree on which of Beckett's fictions are modernist and which are postmodernist. For Susan Brienza, Brian Richardson, and Inger Christensen, Beckett's later fiction starting from Trilogy, is definitely postmodern. For McHale, it is Trilogy alone that marks Beckett's entrance into the postmodern domain. As he writes: "Samuel Beckett makes the transition from modernist to postmodernist poetics in the course of his trilogy of novels of the early 1950s" (McHale, 12). For Brian Finney, however, all Beckett's fictions can be assimilated into the postmodern category, as his entry on Beckett's fiction titled "Samuel Beckett's Postmodern Fictions" indicates. My own sense is that there are postmodern elements in all of Beckett's fictions; his play with language and his assault against realist fiction in them is a matter of degree rather than one of absence and presence. In other words, we find such play and assault more radical in some of his fictions (e.g., Dream, Trilogy) than in others (e.g., Murphy, Watt). But to exclude all the non-trilogy fictions from postmodern aesthetics, as McHale does, and to exclude all the fictions written prior to Trilogy from postmodern aesthetics, as Brienza, Richardson, and Christensen do, is certainly inadequate. 69Beckett, Dream, 240. Additional informationNotes on contributorsLidan Lin Lidan Lin is Professor of English Literature at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, USA and Visiting Professor of English Literature at Southwest University, China

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Dream · Epistemology · Literature · Metafiction · Modernism (music · Mysticism · Narrative · Postmodernism · Realism · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Samuel Beckett and Modernism · Philosophy

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