Year

1993

Text

Type

Publication

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Chronology Entries (1)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1993	Beckett, Samuel. Dream of fair to middling women [ID D30768]. "Supposing we told now a little story about China in order to orchestrate what we mean. Yes? Ling-Liun [the Emperor's music master] then, let us say, went to the confines of the West, to the Bamboo Valley, and having cut there a stem between two knots and blown into same was charmed to constate that it gave forth the sound of his own voice when he spoke, as he mostly did, without passion. From this the phoenix male had the kindness to sing six notes and the phoenix female six other notes and Ling-Liun the minister cut yet eleven stems to correspond with all that he has heard. Then he remitted the twelve liu-liu to his master, the six liu male phoenix and the six liu female phoenix : the Yellow Bell, let us say, the Great Liu, the Great Steepleiron, the Stifled Bell, the Ancient Purification, the Young Liu, the Beneficent Fecundity, the Bell of the Woods, the Equable Rule, the Southern Liu, the Imperfect, the Echo Bell. Now the point is that it is most devoutly to be hoped that some at least of our characters can be cast for posrts in a liu-liu. For example, John might be the Yellow Bell and the Smeraldina-Rima the Young Liu and the Syra-Cusa the Stifted Bell and the Mandarin the Ancient Purification and Belacqua himself the Beneficient Fecundity or the Imperfect, and so on. Then it would only be a question of juggling like Confucius on cubes of jade and playing a tune. If all our characters were like that – liu-liu minded – we could write a little book that would be purely melodic, think how nice that would be, linear, a lovely Pythagorean chain-chant solo of cause and effect, a one-figured teleophony that would be a pleasure to hear…" "Now onec more and for the last time we are obliged to hark back to the liu business, a dreadful business, feeling hearily sorry that we ever fell into the temptation of putting up that owld Tale of a Tub concerning Christopher Ling-Liun and his bamboo Yankee doodle." Sekundärliteratur Lin Lidan : Chinese music as a narrative model : the aesthetics of Liu Liu and metafiction in Samuel Beckett's Dream of fair to middling women. In : English studies ; vol. 91, no 3 (2010). Lin Lidan : Beckett's experiment with metafiction began with his first novel and was inspired by his knowledge of Chinese music, which he obtained from La musique chinoise by Louis Laloy [ID D19345]. Beckett read Laloy's legend about how Chinese music was first invented. The outcome of Beckett's appropriation of Chinese music is a metafictional novel that is usually seen as belonging to postmodern fiction. From a gradual evolution of Chinese music Beckett perceived another parallel between Chinese music and English fiction : just as Chinese music grew out of the rigid formula to embrace the freedom of invention, so English fiction must breat free from the narrative convention of the nineteenth century to welcome the freedom of experiment. Dream embodies Proustian and Joycean resonances. One Proustian resonance is Proust's critique of habit that governs every aspect of human life and his perception of reality as being mystic. The Joycean echo is discernible in Beckett's imitation of the Joycean technique of note-snatching or pastiche, in which both authors use materials taken from other authors without indicating sources. Beckett has written an unpublishable novel, but had to publish it because of his dire need and determination to be a fiction writer, and the new result is the publication of More pricks than kicks (1934), a collection of short stories adapted from Dream. Aided by Laloy and Chinese music, Beckett's postmodern negotiation with realist fiction begins early in the novel, when the narrator just finishes the account of Belacqua's farewell to his lover, the Smeraldina-Rima, a German-speaking student of music. The development of Chinese music from being guided by theory to reinforcing the freedom of sentiment, Beckett saw the possibility to use Chinese music as a narrative model for Dream ; just as Chinese music evolved from the formula of 'liu liu' to gaining the freedom of invention, the novel must expand the narrative convention of the nineteenth century in order to dramatize the characters and events as naturally as possible, rather than what the author orchestrates. Beckett imagines himself acting as a Taoist 'pure man' in writing Dream, the pure man in this case being a purist writer. His allusion to the Taoist 'pure man' appears in The civilization of China by H.A. Giles, which Beckett read while preparing himself to write Dream.	Document: Lin, Lidan. Chinese music as a narrative model : the aesthetics of liu liu and metafiction in Samuel Beckett's "Dream of fair to middling women". In : English studies ; vol. 91, no 3 (2010). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00138381003647608#.UmYz4RAlKqg. (Beck26, Publication)

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#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1	2007-	Worldcat/OCLC	Web / WC