An Introduction on Beckett's Dream of Fair to Middling Women

Abstract

Beckett wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (hereafter Dream), in Paris in the summer of 1932, when he was twenty-six. He would not permit the publication of this earliest novel in his lifetime, though, at first, he had tried hard to publish it. The novel was to reach the public only in 1992, three years after his death. In 1932, Beckett was still an unknown young man who had just started his literary career. Whi]e he was teaching English at the Ecole Normale Sup~rieure from 1928 to 1930, he was ab]e to breathe the atmosphere of the flourishing avant-garde movements of Paris, for which, we can well imagine, he had had a great longing in Dublin. Among other things, he got to know James Joyce who was then writing Finnegans Wake (still Work in Progress at that time). ~eckett almost worshipped Joyce and was much influenced by him. Joyce in turn recognised this young compatriot's talent and valued his help in the composition of Work in Progress. Beckett published an essay, "Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce," in 1929, in which he explicated and defended the still unpopular Work in Progress. In the next year his prize-winning first poem, Wlloroscope, came out. In 1931, he published a monograph, Proust. These and other minor writings were all he had published when he wrote Dream. After he found it unpublishable, he reshaped it into a collection of ten short stories which have the same hero Belacqua and are slightly more readable.1 This collection, into which some parts of Dream were incorporated, was entitled More Pricks Than Kicks and published in 1934. Joyce's infiuence on Dream is manifest. There are many obsolete or archaic words, many coinages and there is a good deal of wordplay. Foreign languages (especially Latin, French, German and Italian) abound and mix with English. Different styles are used : visionary (dream-like), realistic, ar~haic, or parodic style. Moreover, there is an almost overwhelming amount of literary a]lusion. The title itse]f parodies Tennyson's A Dream of Fair Women.2 The epigraph is taken from the opening lines of Chaucer's The Legendof Good Women, on which the poem of Tennyson is based. The text constantiy refers to