Echo's Bones

by Samuel Beckett

  ‘clonus’: from Greek ‘turmoil’ or ‘tumult’, a form of movement marked by alternating contractions and relaxations of a muscle, usually in quick succession. Beckett’s poem ‘Serena II’ refers to ‘clonic earth’ (CP 19).

  ‘happiness, possession of being well deceived’: quoting Swift’s definition of happiness in his digression on madness in A Tale of a Tub, which Beckett had studied at TCD.

  ‘hypnosis’: in DN, Beckett noted that ‘Hypnosis a dominant condition of life’ (1154), quoting Jules de Gaultier, ‘L’hypnose gouverne tout ce qui est vivant’ (De Kant à Nietzsche, 1930, 37). Gaultier quotes the myth of ‘Titania pressing to her bosom the ass’s head of her love’ to show the power of desire, hence Beckett’s footnote here to ‘Titania and the Ass’. Used also in Dream: ‘pressing à la Titania asses to our boosoms’ (160).

  ‘honing’: ‘longing for’; cf. DN, ‘don’t be honing after home’ (818), based on Burton (II, 175): ‘’Tis a childish humour to hone after home’. In Dream, Belacqua hones after the dark (51).

  ‘nervous subject’: identified in Beckett’s footnote as Shakespeare, Richard III, specifically V, iii, where Richard states that ‘shadows to-night have struck more terror’ to his soul than ‘the substance of ten thousand soldiers’.

  ‘motion of the earth . . . system of Galileo’: a reference to Galileo’s affirmation of the Copernican theory that the earth’s movement is controlled by the sun (Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo, 1632). From his reading of James Jeans’s The Universe Around Us (1929), Beckett noted ‘Galileo’s investigation of solar system’ in DN (1041). In Dream, the poet Chas declares ‘The poem moves, eppure’ (324), referring to the phrase ‘Eppure si muove’ (‘Yet it moves’), allegedly muttered by Galileo after he was forced to recant his theory of the earth’s movement during an inquisitional hearing in June 1633. Belacqua, standing on the deck of a ship, ‘moves forward, like the Cartesian earthball, with the moving ship’ (Dream 134; repeated in Molloy (46) and The Unnamable (330). This image may well derive from Beckett’s reading of J. P. Mahaffy’s Descartes (1880): ‘The earth did indeed move, but it was like a passenger on a vessel, who, though he was stationary, is nevertheless carried along by the motion of the larger system which surrounds him’ (61). This in turn informed the ‘Cartesian’ poem ‘Whoroscope’ (1930), where Galileo appears: ‘We’re moving he said we’re off’ and ‘That’s not moving, that’s moving’ (CP 40). Cf. also Watt: ‘and yet it moved, like Galileo’s cradle’ (the cradle introduced by way of Arnoldus Geulincx’s Ethics).

  ‘poem by Uhland’: unclear which poem Beckett has in mind, but his knowledge of the romantic poet Ludwig Uhland appears to have come, as John Pilling discovered, from Heinrich Heine’s essay ‘Die Romantische Schule’. Beckett cites this essay, and alludes to Uhland in his review of Mörike’s Mozart on the Journey to Prague (Spectator 23 May 1934; cf. Dis 61–2).

  ‘black cylindrical Galloway cow . . . slipped calf’: details in this passage are taken, mostly verbatim, from Beckett’s set of notes with the heading ‘Cow’ (TCD MS10971/2, 7v), which note that to ‘slip calf’ equals ‘abort’.

  ‘greatly eased’: as Ruby Tough, having shed her skirt, in ‘Love and Lethe’ (MPTK 94), and Doyle repeatedly later in this story.

  ‘the article of death’: Latin ‘in articulo mortis’, at the moment of death.

  ‘don’t utter all your mind’: Proverbs 29:11 – ‘a fool uttereth all his mind’ (DN 568).

  ‘mare’s-tail’: the common name for cirrus clouds.

  ‘Addison’s disease’: rare condition caused by failure of the adrenal glands, resulting, amongst other things, in increased pigmentation of the skin.

  ‘pilch’: triangular wrapper of cloth, worn over a baby’s diaper.

  ‘sail a boat’ – echoing the last line of Rimbaud’s ‘Les poètes de sept ans’: ‘et pressentant violemment la voile!’ (‘and violently announcing a sail’).

  ‘you hedge’: in that Zaborovna refuses to answer the question (‘When you say “put me up” . . . what do you mean exactly?’) directly, but also playing on her surname. In Dream, the Alba’s ‘immobility’ forces Belacqua to ‘hedge’ (170).

  ‘a crowd’: a similar parade of characters occurs during the Fricas’ party at the end of Dream, in ‘What a Misfortune’ and ‘A Wet Night’. Many of these characters appear in MPTK, and their appearance here marks Beckett’s attempt to establish narrative consistency between ‘Echo’s Bones’ and the other stories of the collection.

  ‘Vespers . . . Sicilian’: Sicilian Vespers is the name given to a bloody uprising on the island of Sicily against French rule in 1282.

  ‘Monthly masquerading as a Quarterly’: A swipe at The Dublin Magazine, edited by Seumas O’Sullivan. The journal had started out as a monthly, but became a quarterly. The Dublin Magazine published Beckett’s poem ‘Alba’ in 1931, but had turned down the poem ‘Enueg I’ (1931) and, more recently, a short story, possibly ‘Ding-Dong’ (spring 1933).

  ‘John Jameson o’Lantern’: John Jameson, the founder of Jameson’s whisky in Dublin, linked to ‘Jack O’Lantern’, the Irish tradition of carving pumpkins. Mercier and Camier drink ‘JJ’.

  ‘exophthalmic goitre’: also known as Graves’ disease, a form of hyperthyroidism (overproduction of thyroid hormones). Murphy’s horoscope cites ‘Grave’s disease’ (21).

  ‘Gipsy Rondo’: cf. Haydn’s piano trio in G major, nicknamed the ‘Gypsy’ or ‘Gypsy Rondo’, because of its Rondo finale in ‘Hungarian’ style.

  ‘glabrous but fecund’: taken from Garnier (485) and noted as ‘natura glabrum infecundum’ in DN (485); from the same source (70) he also noted the word ‘glabréité’ (smooth-skinned) in DN (454). Lord Gall may be bald, but he is not fecund. Cf. the ‘glabrous crown’ in Dream (157) and the ‘glabrous cod’ in the poem ‘To My Daughter’ (CP 35).

  ‘aguas’: from The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by herself; the aguas are the waters with which the contemplative soul is irrigated by God (noted by John Pilling).

  ‘iluminaciones’: Illuminations, Arthur Rimbaud’s collection of prose poems, translated into Spanish; cf. ‘Staps, the young illuminatio’ (DN 49) taken from Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne’s Memoirs of Napoleon (1829–31) (II, 20), and the ‘illuminati’ in Murphy (107).

  ‘Hairy’: Belacqua’s best man, ‘Hairy’ Capper Quin supported the Smeraldina after Belacqua’s death. Like Lord Gall, he is ‘glabrous’, but unlike Lord Gall, his nickname ‘Hairy’ implies potency.

  ‘stiff and open’: in Watt, the eponymous hero’s gait is also ‘stiff and open’ (24).

  ‘Baby Austen’: first manufactured in 1922, the Baby Austin was a seven-horsepower car for the masses, here conjoined with Jane Austen.

  ‘Count of Parabimbi’: the Countess of Parabimbi had already appeared in Dream. The name implies, in Italian, that they are ‘beyond children’, i.e. ‘without’.

  ‘mending . . . a hard place in Eliot’: the phrase is found in DN (945) with Dante instead of T. S. Eliot; adapted from Burton (III, 270).

  ‘to quire their manifesto’: quire – ‘singing in concert’; Beckett ridicules the modernist fascination with publishing manifestos (and may be recalling the inclusion of his name by Eugene Jolas in the ‘Poetry is Vertical’ manifesto in transition, March 1932). A quire also refers to a set of twenty-four sheets of paper of the same size.

  ‘Poulter’s Measure’: verse form alternating twelve and fourteen syllables, popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the term derives from poulters’ (poulterers’) habit of selling sometimes twelve, sometimes fourteen to a dozen.

  ‘thick of the mischief . . . ex-eunuchs’: reference to the demise of the House of Han as described in H. A. Giles’s The Civilisation of China (1911) (79), and noted in DN: ‘the eunuchs as usual in the thick of the mischief’ (518).

  ‘Caleken Frica’: mother and daughter Frica appear in Dream and MPTK, and are based on Beckett’s friend Mary Manning and her mother S
usan. ‘Caleken’ derives from a young woman called Caleken Peters, held in a corrective institution run by Cornelius Hadrien, a Franciscan priest who used the whip to discipline his female penitents – naked, hence the reference here. Beckett took the story from Cooper (124–33) and entered her name in DN (375). ‘Frica’ derives from ‘fricatrice’, as in ‘a base harlot, a lewd fricatrice’ (Ben Jonson, Volpone). Beckett found the word in Garnier’s Onanisme seul et à deux (448).

  ‘riddle of her navel minnehaha minnehaha’: Minnehaha is the lover of Hiawatha in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Yet the riddle remains a riddle. ‘Hiawatha’ appears in ‘Love and Lethe’ (MPTK 96).

  ‘honeymoon unicorn’: in myth, the unicorn could only be summoned and tamed by a virgin; this ‘honeymoon’ would thus be another unconsummated affair.

  ‘half-hunter’: a watch with a hinged lid; Mr Ash has one in Watt, as does Pozzo in Waiting for Godot.

  ‘Yogi’: a (traditionally Indian) practitioner of the system of yoga.

  ‘milkman’: raw, organic milk is considered to be the most nutritious of foods by yogis.

  ‘standard candle’: measurement of light-source intensity, a term now replaced by the candela.

  ‘leprechaun’: spelt variously, the leprechaun is defined as a pigmy sprite in Irish folklore in the 1817 supplement to O’Reilly’s Irish Dictionary.

  ‘riding in his brain (abdominal)’: reference to the ‘abdominal brain’, the solar plexus.

  ‘Debauch and Death’: based on an entry in DN, ‘Debauchery & Death, Schroud [sic] and Alcove’ (276), taken from Praz’s The Romantic Agony (31), who in turn is quoting Baudelaire’s ‘Les deux bonnes sœurs’.

  ‘passed by . . . until the last’: copied from Augustine (XI, vi) as noted in DN: ‘The non-eternal voice / For that voice passed by & passed away, began & ended; the syllables sounded & passed away, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so forth in order, until the last after the rest, & silence after the last’ (189). Cf. also Dream (105, 137).

  ‘androgyne’: the word ‘androgynous’ is noted in DN (325) and taken from Praz (206). In Molloy, Lousse is described as ‘androgyne’ (51).

  ‘tempestuous loveliness’: quoting Shelley’s poem ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery’, probably via Praz (26).

  ‘a spacious nothing’: more material from Augustine (VII, i) noted in DN (125): ‘A void place, a spacious nothing’. Also used in Dream (185) and Murphy (56).

  ‘Bad one by one . . . very bad all together’: Beckett inverts here a note in DN (210) – ‘good one by one: very good all together (Days of Creation)’ – based on Augustine (XIII, xxvii).

  ‘rent silk’: quoting Giles’s The Civilisation of China (23), as noted in DN: ‘like the melancholy royal Chinese concubine who loved the sound of rent silk’; the concubine in question is Yang Kuei-fei (509).

  ‘mandrakes’: the mandragora; in common superstition mandrakes grow from the ejaculations of hanged men and scream when uprooted – hence the ‘frightful sound’ of the previous sentence. Cf. Molloy (162) and Waiting for Godot (9).

  ‘Gnaeni, the pranic bleb’: ‘Gnani’ means ‘wise’ in several languages. ‘Prana’, in yoga, is the ‘breath’ and life principle inhabiting all animate things, but here reduced to a ‘bleb’, a basic cell organism. ‘Prana’ reappears in Murphy (117).

  ‘A dog . . . the fair’: two lines taken from Jonathan Swift’s ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’ (1713), the missing line indicated by the ellipsis being ‘Or some worse brute in human shape’.

  ‘Partagas’: a Cuban cigar brand established in 1845.

  ‘Voltigeur’: French cigar; Joyce famously won a box of Voltigeurs from Sylvia Beach after correctly predicting that George Bernard Shaw would not subscribe to Ulysses.

  ‘hissing vipers of her hair . . . Gorgon’: in Greek mythology, Minerva transformed the Gorgon Medusa’s beautiful hair into snakes, after she was ravished in the temple of Minerva by Neptune; Beckett will have come across the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but the more immediate influence is probably Shelley’s poem ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery’ (already quoted earlier in the story) via Praz’s The Romantic Agony (42).

  ‘treed’: driven up a tree (or here a fence), as ‘a man pursued by wild beasts’ (OED).

  ‘the four and twenty letters . . . diversity of moods’: based on Burton (I, 408): ‘than melancholy conceipts produce diversity of symptoms in several persons’. Beckett copied into DN: ‘the four & twenty letters make no more variety of words in divers languages than . . . produce variety . . .’ (786). Cf. Dream 126.

  ‘jigsaw’: Beckett to MacGreevy, on the writing of More Pricks Than Kicks: ‘I had been working at the short stories and had done about half or two thirds enough when it suddenly dried up and I had to leave it there. Perhaps I may get it going again now. But it is all jigsaw and I am not interested’ (22 June 1933; LSB I 168).

  ‘intruding like a flea her loose familiarities into the most retired places’: from John Donne’s ‘A Defence of Womens Inconstancy’: ‘Women are like Flies, which feed among us at our Table, or Fleas sucking our very blood, who leave not our most retired places free from their familiarity, yet for all their fellowship will they never be tamed nor commanded by us’. Beckett also uses the phrase ‘admittance to the most retired places’ in Murphy (30). Cf. also ‘Yellow’ (MPTK 162).

  ‘up hill and down dale’: also used in the poem ‘Sanies I’ (CP 12), in Beckett’s translation of Matías de Bocanegra’s poem ‘Song on Beholding an Enlightenment’ (CP 155) and in Dream (72), where it is linked with the Grimms’ tale ‘How the Cat and the Mouse Set Up House’.

  ‘Ninus the Assyrian’: from Taylor (I, ii), which tells the story of Ninus, who had an ‘ocean of gold’ but ‘having mingled his wines he threw the rest upon the stones’. Once a ‘living man’, Ninus is (like Belacqua?) ‘nothing but clay’.

  ‘bemired with sins . . . meat of worms’: using further material from Taylor (II, vii): ‘Bemired with sins and naked of good deeds, I, that am the meat of worms, cry vehemently in spirit’. The line is from a prayer taken from the Euchologion of the Greek Church for those ‘near their death’. Beckett first wrote ‘aliment of worms’ but replaced it with ‘meat of worms’, subsequently replacing ‘meaty’ with ‘fruity’ in the same line to avoid repetition.

  ‘agape for the love-feast’: the Greek agape, in the New Testament, referred to the ‘fatherly love of God for humans, as well as the human reciprocal love for God. The Church Fathers used agape to designate both a rite (using bread and wine) and a meal of fellowship to which the poor were invited’ (Encyclopedia Britannica). In Latin, the word became synonymous with ‘love-feast’. Beckett’s version of the Eucharist (using rum and garlic) here is rather more sexual than spiritual. In its old form, ‘agape’ also means ‘gaping’, and in this context the word also relates to the ‘horrid jaws’. Beckett uses the word in this meaning in ‘Worstward Ho’ (114 and 115). The prose piece ‘He is Barehead’ (‘Fizzles’) has ‘hands agape’ (224).

  ‘Hutchinson fangs’: thick and deeply notched teeth, a result of hereditary, congenital syphilis. Cf. the 1930s poem ‘Spring Song’, which refers to ‘the gums the fang of the tongue’ (CP 46). Belacqua in ‘Dante and the Lobster’ has ‘fangs’ (MPTK 13), and Sucky Moll in Malone Dies has a ‘solitary fang’.

  ‘bosom pal’: cf. ‘bosom butty’ in Dream (49).

  ‘dream of the shadow’: another reference to Dream.

  ‘sun opened a little eye in the heaven . . . light to a cock’: ‘But as when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock’ (Taylor I, iii).

  ‘lush plush of womby-tomby’: cf. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’: ‘Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey’ (stanza 7) and ‘a lush-kept plush-capped sloe’ (stanza 8) .

/>   ‘Elysium’: in Greek mythology, the dwelling place of happy souls after death.

  ‘guttatim’: the word, meaning ‘drop by drop’, is noted in DN: ‘Distillatio (n): semen & mucous – guttatim’ (439). Cf. Dream: ‘opium guttatim’ (86).

  ‘familiar attitude’: that is to say embryonic, as Belacqua in Dante.

  ‘spado’: a castrated person, a eunuch, or a ‘cut and thrust sword’ (OED); cf. ‘Draff’ (MPTK 187).

  ‘tail’: refers to the entailment to an estate when a male heir exists. This sentence sets up Belacqua’s meeting with Lord Gall, who is indeed impotent and thus in danger of losing his estate. This particular passage is developed in Murphy.

  ‘betossed soul’: Romeo and Juliet (V, iii). Cf. also entry in DN (122) taken from Augustine: ‘The audacious soul – turned it hath & turned again, upon back sides & belly – yet all was painful’ (VI, xvi).

  goat: emblematic of the libidinous. In Murphy, Miss Carridge has a goatish smell, and ‘caper[s]’ in the ‘tragic’ mode (82) – the word ‘tragedy’ originally meaning ‘goat-song’.

  ‘Jetzer’: see DN (371): ‘Brother Jetzer vomited up the poisoned host’, taken from Cooper, Flagellation and Flagellants (95). Johannes Jetzer (1483–1514) was a Dominican lay brother who claimed to have had visions of the Virgin Mary. He was subsequently investigated by the Inquisition.

  ‘Juniperus’: Appears in DN entry (362) listing gymnophists celebrating the naked bottom: ‘Cynics / Gymnosophists (naked sages) / Adamites / Turlupins / Picards / and brother Juniperus’; taken from Cooper (47). Brother Juniperus was a Franciscan monk who emulated Adam’s prelapsarian nudity. Cf. Dream 98.

  ‘firk’: the line ‘firked his hide (Rabbinical interpretation of “Gave him of the tree & he did eat”)’, from Cooper (373; quoting Samuel Butler’s Hudibras), is in DN (380).

  ‘secret love’: from Cooper (377): ‘Open chastisement is better than secret love’ (DN 382).

  ‘wearish’: cf. the ‘little wearish old man (Democritus)’ in DN (720), used in the poem ‘Enueg I’ (CP 7).