Pilling - Samuel Becketts More Pricks Than Kicks: In A Strait Of Two Wills

Samuel Becketts
More Pricks Than Kicks

Continuum Studies in Historicizing Modernism

Series Editors: Matthew Feldman, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History, University of Northampton, UK; and Erik Tonning, Senior Researcher, University of Bergen, Norway

Associate Editor: Paul Jackson, Lecturer in History, Open University, UK

Editorial Board: Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. Johns College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Reader in 20th Century Literature, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, Oxford Brookes University, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Director, Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; Professor Janet Wilson, Deptartment of English, University of Northanpton, UK

Continuum Studies in Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival approaches to literature, and working beyond the usual European/American avant-garde 19001945 parameters, this series reassesses established views of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual backgrounds, working methods and manuscript research.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid

Reframing Yeats: Genre and History in the Poems, Prose and Plays, Charles Ivan Armstrong

Samuel Becketts German Diaries 193637, Mark Nixon

Samuel Becketts More Pricks Than Kicks, John Pilling

Samuel Becketts
More Pricks Than Kicks

In a Strait of Two Wills

John Pilling

Continuum International Publishing Group

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John Pilling 2011

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John Pilling has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-4411-6358-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

For Jenny Halstead

The powers of evocation of this Italianate Irishman were simply immense, and if his Dream of Fair to Middling Women, held up in the limae labor stage for the past ten or fifteen years, ever reaches the public, and Walter says it is bound to, we ought all be sure to get it and have a look at it anyway.(What a Misfortune)

Contents

Series Editors Preface

This book series is devoted to the analysis of late nineteenth- to twentieth-century literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing monographs, scholarly editions and edited collections on Modernist authors and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. Correspondingly, one burgeoning subdiscipline of Modernism, Beckett Studies, features heavily here as a metonymy for the opportunities presented by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of canonical authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly minor or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted towards the English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone Modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally based exploration shall also be included here.

A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic autonomy employed by many Modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of Modernist writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept of Modernism itself. Similarly, the very notion of historicizing Modernism remains debatable, and this series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way.

Matthew Feldman

Erik Tonning

Preface

... in a strait of two wills...

(Dream of Fair to Middling Women, A Wet Night)

This is the first full-length study of Becketts first work of published fiction, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934). I analyse the book as the product of competing tensions in Beckett, some personal and some generic, as figured in the character and alter ego Belacqua, Belacqua Shuah as he appears in What A Misfortune and in Draff. Of the young thought of Belacqua we learn in Dream of Fair toMiddling Women (35, hereafter Dream) that it was stocked... and confused in a way that was opposed to its real interests. The confusion did not diminish when, Dream having failed to make any impact, Beckett felt compelled to continue. But the terms in which it could be thought through underwent some decisive changes.

More Pricks Than Kicks has never been granted the close attention from which it benefits, and from which it can also suffer. For a number of reasons, as I try to show, Becketts own attitude to the book his first appearance before the general public as a creative writer was extremely dismissive, even by his own typically severe standards. This study seeks to retrieve what most matters in More Pricks and also deals with a number of related issues arising out of its conception, execution and reception.

.

I have written this book, subtitled In A Strait of Two Wills, in the hope of stimulating further exploration of one of Becketts most neglected works, and in the belief that More Pricks Than Kicks is a much more substantial achievement than anyone, Beckett himself included, has been willing to acknowledge.

Acknowledgements

My thanks, as always, go to Edward Beckett and the Estate of Samuel Beckett as administered by Rosica Colin Ltd., especially for permissions to quote unpublished material, and to Cambridge University Press for permission to cite The Letters of Samuel Beckett 19291940 (CUP, 2009). For permission to quote from More Pricks Than Kicks, I thank Paul Keegan and Faber and Faber Ltd.