More than Fair to Middling

Samuel Beckett's Dream of Fair to middling Women has been an entirely worthwhile experience. It's probably okay to call it a bildunsroman although it might prefer not to be called anything and just be itself as is the wont of many of us.

It doesn't want to be seen as a novel in the sense of Balzac or Jane Austen with their sense of character. That is just one of the things it sets itself against as coherent 'personality' seems to break up in this sensory world. It can't really be said to have a story either but it wouldn't be the first or last novel to not have.

What it can't help but be, though, is Joycean not only as a portrait of an artist as a young man, its myriad literariness and the way in which it is a gentle introduction to the ways and means of Ulysses and the Wake. 

Quite how well it works as a whole will be for professors of Beckett to explain but there are such glorious passages of writing that it serves to revive the jaded spirit that sometimes wonders when the resources of language might become used up like other natural resources of the world.

One of the three women the 'hero', Belacqua, finds himself caught between is the Alba, described as,

Alone, unlonely, unconcerned, moored in the seethe of an element in which she had no movement and from which therefore she was not doomed to filch the daily mite that would guarantee, in a freighting and darkening of her spirit, the declension of that movement.

and we might guess at what's happening two pages later when,

it is now or never the time to sidetrack and couple those two lone birds and give them at least a chance to make a hit and bring it off, would it not be idle on our part to temporize further and hold up the happy event with the gratuitous echolalia and claptrap rhapsodies that are palmed off as passion and the high spots of  creative ecstasy...

 

So, Beckett was not always the absurd minimalist he became more famous for being, reducing theatre and writing to as little as he very meaningfully could. He had once expounded quite beautifully, while equally dismissively, and word is that had Joyce lived a bit longer he would have followed up the Wake with something reduced back to Dubliners-style plain-ness maybe because once one has explored as far as it is possible to go and searched beyond, that is all that remains.  

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Next up, then, is a choice between the 745 pages of the Ellman Joyce biography or the story of just Ulysses that is only half as much. One can't put them off forever.