“Juggling like Confucius on Cubes of Jade”

Sean Lawlor

Samuel Beckett’s Dream Notebook at the Beckett International Foundation in Reading contains nine citations from Louis Laloy’s La Musique Chinoise, a source which I discovered, (see John Pilling Beckett’s Dream Notebook, Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999). Although these notes account for less than 1% of the total entries in the notebook,  I will argue that they have a significant influence in Beckett’s work of the early 1930s.  Laloy, makes an important contribution to Dream of Fair to middling Women, where the Chinese system of musical notation (the liú-liù) provides for an, as it turns out, inadequate means of calibrating the recalcitrant characters of the novel, while the music of the Chinese qin (or k’in in Laloy’s transliteration) is an important means of extending both of the poems Alba and Dortmunder in space by providing an exotic note to the transcendental and earthly paradises created in the poems.  The paper will discuss how this material is integrated with other material from Beckett’s reading to meet his own imaginative ends.  I will trace the occurrence of the liú-liù motif in Dream of Fair to middling Women and how it relates to material from another orientaliist source in the Dream notebook, H.A. Giles’s The Civilization of China.  I shall also discuss the ways in which the music of the qin in the poems in integrated with borrowings from other sources, principally Dante’s Paradiso in Alba, and the Circe episode in Homer in Dortmunder.  I shall attempt to draw some conclusions about the significance of this “orientalising” in Beckett’s work in the literary context of the early 30s.  In conclusion, I will suggest that throughout  the running digression on liú-liù and the poetic allusions to the qin music, Beckett  was juggling ideas like Confucius his cubes of jade (the pien k’ing) and in doing so, demonstrating, in a moral pointed up by Laloy that:  “Nothing is difficult for those who have not lost courage!”

PhD student, University of Reading

Borderless Beckett: International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006 September 29 – October 1