Chapter 8

Describing Arabesques: Beckett and Dance

Thomas Mansell

‘Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.’ is a maxim frequently attributed (somewhat surprisingly) to Samuel Beckett.¹ No doubt it gains traction precisely because it sits at odds with the somewhat austere, cerebral Beckett of popular imagination: if even he advocates physical abandon over intellect, then surely it can do no harm! As a young man, Beckett himself ‘described arabesques of an original pattern’² one Bastille Day, much as James Joyce was wont to break ‘into spontaneous “spider dances” in the street’.³ However, the meaning of dance both for and in Beckett, particularly as it relates to his own specific ‘musicality’, is as complex as the authenticity of the ‘quotation’ itself.⁴

As we shall see, debates concerning the relationship between music and dance were particularly animated during Beckett’s formative years and important for his own artistic development. In his early fiction, they emerge as reflections on the relationship between the mind and the body and, specifically, on attempts to control one with the other, revealing a certain unease which no amount of irony can fully mask. Later, Beckett’s own plays would set out certain (and uncertain) movements, and ‘choreography’ and ‘ballet’ would become useful metaphors for describing Beckett’s work as a whole. However, both the movements and the metaphor are, I shall argue, curiously one-dimensional – as if the only way Beckett (and Beckettians) could reconcile dance with music or body with mind was to pursue precisely this sort of parallelism, with music/mind the leading partner in their respective pairs. Elsewhere, though, Beckett’s works seem to guard against the need to ‘describe arabesques’ with complete command, with the inability of thought or language to do so being accepted as inevitable and even welcome.

Music and Dance: Symphonic Ballets

In a letter of July 1934 to Morris Sinclair, Beckett casts ‘music’ and ‘ballet’ not so much as complementary art forms but as mutually exclusive opposites.

Do not believe that ballet is music. It is precisely because music has a subordinate part in it that ballet annoys me. For serious music cannot be of use. To represent a piece of music in a particular way, by means of dancing, gestures, settings, costumes, etc., is to degrade it by reducing its value to mere anecdote. There are people who cannot achieve satisfaction unless they can see. As for me, to my misfortune no doubt, I cannot go off unless my eyes are closed.⁵

One feels a little sorry for Beckett’s then-teenage cousin, who seems to have responded too enthusiastically to an earlier letter in which Beckett spoke of having seen ‘a few ballets, among which [Manuel] de Falla’s Tricorne, with Picasso décor & costumes. You would have loved it.’⁶ The fact that ‘ballet’ is not ‘music’ need not imply a value-judgement, although for Beckett it evidently does. Nor does Beckett’s earlier praise for Joyce’s Work in Progress – ‘when the sense is dancing, the words dance’⁷ – present a counterargument, since Beckett also admired how ‘when the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep’.⁸ Nevertheless, for words to ‘dance’ (or to ‘sleep’) does impute to prose more physicality, more vitality than it is generally permitted (Beckett also admired the way Joyce’s words ‘elbow their way onto the page’⁹), taking mimesis to new levels of embodied identity.

The debate about the relative merits of dance and music was prevalent at the time. In Terpsichore (1928), the surrealist Philippe Soupault (with whom Beckett had dealings over the French translation of the ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ section of Joyce’s Work in Progress¹⁰) railed against what he saw as the disastrous influence of the Ballets Russes.¹¹ Instead of ‘enslaving’ dance to music, Soupault argued, we should recognize that ‘the essence of one is utterly different to the essence of the other’.¹² However, in 1933 Léonid Massine (principal choreographer of the Ballets Russes from 1915 to 1921) staged the first of his ‘symphonic ballets’, the very notion seeming to threaten the ideal of autonomous absolute music so central to Beckett’s embryonic aesthetics. London’s leading music critic of the time, Ernest Newman, took something of a Beckettian attitude, at least initially. At the premiere of Les Présages (on Beckett’s birthday, as it happened), Newman was heard to say ‘I shall close my eyes and listen to the music’ (Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony);¹³ however, as Irina Baronova comments, ‘he must have peeped with at least one eye and liked what he saw as in his review the next day he had the grace to admit that Massine was a genius of the same calibre as the great composer’.¹⁴ Beckett reacted with incredulity to Newman’s conversion, which he followed in the pages of The Sunday Times:

Newman has been very plausible on the symphonic ballet. Is he a bad logician on purpose, because he knows how much more persuasive sophistry is? And how appallingly English the sense of humour. Surely a Wagnerite must admire Choreartium [Massine’s second ‘symphonic ballet, premiered in October 1933] for all the wrong reasons. And to extend a protest against symphony for balletic purposes to a protest against lyric for Lieder purposes surely is nonsense.¹⁵

Newman had argued that Massine’s supposedly controversial fusion of dance and symphonic music was no worse than, say, Schubert’s setting to music of poems by Wilhelm Müller in Winterreise, a point which Beckett dismissed without offering supporting reasons.

Choreartium was even more provocative than Les Présages, according to a logic outlined by another prominent music critic – and friend of McGreevy¹⁶ – Constant Lambert:

[Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky] would indeed have failed as ballet composers were their work to be satisfying in the concert-hall. But a Beethoven symphony, like a speech in Hamlet or an ode by Keats, satisfies us completely in its present form. Any action which might accompany it would either be an irritating distraction or a superfluous echo.¹⁷

At least Tchaikovsky had also written ballet scores: Choreartium was set to the Fourth Symphony by Brahms (who inherited Beethoven’s mantle as the leading composer of absolute music (such as sonatas and symphonies), as opposed to the more programmatic, multimedial ‘New German Music’ inspired by Liszt and Wagner).¹⁸ After his Symphonie fantastique (1936), set to Berlioz’s eponymous score, Massine committed what for Lambert, as for Beckett, must have been the ultimate effrontery, by creating a piece (which premiered in May 1938) using Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony – the ‘dearest of the nine’¹⁹ for Beckett, the one appealed to in his ‘German letter’ of 9 July 1937 to Axel Kaun,²⁰ and twice thought of by Belacqua in Dream of Fair to Middling Women²¹ (or in ‘What a Misfortune’²²). When Beckett found out, he was witheringly sarcastic:

Massine & Co. are here at the new Trocadero. I did not know he had done the 7th Symphony. Cocteau is reported to be making a ballet of [Racine’s] Britannicus. With Harpo Marx as Junie I suppose.²³

In other letters, Beckett disapproved of his elder brother’s predilection for dancing (‘Frank goes every evening to a dance, + we seem to have nothing to talk about’; ‘Frank is well, but overdancing’²⁴), whereas he instead preferred to attend concerts and to play the piano, including duets with McGreevy’s landlady, Hester Dowden:²⁵

I do not see much of Hester, but it always goes very well when I go round, and we play the Pavane with special reference to the obeisances in the dance.²⁶

The ‘Pavane’ is Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, which Beckett had earlier used as incidental music in ‘The Kid’, a skit co-written with Georges Pelorson at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1931.²⁷ Beckett’s remark proves Theodor Adorno’s point, that ‘what are taken to be the purest forms (e.g., traditional musical forms) can be traced back even in the smallest idiomatic detail to content such as dance’²⁸– a truth which renders highly problematic Beckett’s wish to demarcate discrete realms for ‘music’ and for ‘dance’. A diary entry from Beckett’s stay in Hamburg the following year furnishes further evidence, with Beckett singularly unimpressed by the attempts of another pianist to ‘describe arabesques’:

Arrive Durrieu about 4. First. Look at some Radziwill Radierungen. Usual crew of Saxons begins to trickle in. Butt a Nürnbergerin to play piano, & a Bulgarian. She plays Debussy Arabesques, Brahms’ Walzer, bien worse than I, & Liszt Consolation. Bloody awful.²⁹

Dream, Murphy and the MMM

Some of these issues surface in Beckett’s first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932, pub. 1992). On the book’s second page, we learn that the anti-hero, Belacqua, is in love with the Smeraldina-Rima because

she mentioned that she cared for nothing in heaven above or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth so much as the music of Bach and that she was taking herself off almost at once and for good and all to Vienna to study the pianoforte. The result of this was that the curds [of her bosom] put forth suckers of Sargasso, and enmeshed him.³⁰

The Smeraldina is in fact off to study ‘music and eurhythmics in the very vanguardful SchuleDunkelbrau’³¹ – a somewhat less abstract and more varied curriculum than she had given Belacqua to understand.

The Dunkelbrau gals were very Evite and nudist and shocked even the Mödelbergers when they went in their Harlequin pantalettes, or just culotte and sweater and uncontrollable cloak, to the local Kino. All very callisthenic and cerebro-hygenic and promotive of great strength and beauty. In the summer they lay on the roof and bronzed their bottoms and impudenda. And all day it was dancing and singing and music and douches and frictions and bending and stretching and classes – Harmonie, Anatomie, Psychologie, Improvisation, with a powerful ictus on the last syllable in each case.³²

Beckett seems to have in his sights Emile Jacques-Dalcroze’s Schule Hellerau-Laxenburg, where his cousin Peggy Sinclair had studied.³³ Lucia Joyce (thought to be the model for the Syra-Cusa) was also a student of Dalcroze.³⁴ It was indeed near Vienna (lying nine miles to the south), and the Smeraldina did have piano lessons as part of her training,³⁵ but in most respects this was hardly the devout, intellectual fare that Belacqua might have imagined when she first spoke of her plans and invoked the great name of Bach.

The music/dance relationship is part of a larger anxiety in the novel about the body, very neatly expounded in that initial scene, where Belacqua finds himself particularly affected by ‘the béret that she had snatched off to wave when the ship began to draw clear’:

The sun had bleached it from green to a very poignant reseda and it had always, from the very first moment he clapped eyes on it, affected him as being a most shabby, hopeless and moving article. It might have been a tuft of grass growing the way she ripped it off her little head and began to wave it with an idiotic clockwork movement of her arm, up and down, not to flutter it like a handkerchief, but grasping it in the middle to raise it and lower it with a stiff arm as though she were doing an exercise with a dumb-bell.³⁶

The Smeraldina’s gestures are deemed neither graceful nor spontaneous but mechanical and muscular (though there is also a hint that her naivety is more natural (grass-like) than socially or culturally conditioned (like the handkerchief)). However, Belacqua himself is caught in the same situation, as this is all part of his own quite self-conscious attempt at a display of feeling as he ‘works himself up to the little gush of tears that would exonerate him’, his mind a ‘piston’, his emotion a matter of ‘technique’.³⁷ Very soon, however, Belacqua discovers that this ‘fetish […] refused to work’:³⁸ ‘he switched on as usual, after the throttling and expunction, and nothing happened. The cylinders of his mind abode serene’.³⁹ While he seemed to sneer at the double sense in which the Smeraldina’s beret was a ‘moving article’, this simple simultaneity of sentiment and movement is denied to Belacqua.

Similar themes are played out in Murphy (1936, pub. 1938), particularly in Neary’s theories – tantalizingly appealing to the eponymous anti-hero – of what he variously terms ‘the Apmonia’, ‘the Isomony’ or ‘the Attunement’.⁴⁰ The ambiguities surrounding Murphy’s death – whether it is a deliberate suicide or an unfortunate accident, and what it means to take either possibility as the apotheosis of Murphy’s belief-system – share a great deal with Dream of Fair to Middling Women. As Beckett worked through these issues in his fiction of the 1930s, his intention, at least in part, seems to have been to ironize that aspect of himself which struggled with the mind/body conundrum and to suggest that any attempts to engender emotional states through premeditated movements are doomed to fail.

However, in Murphy any implied polarity between the abstraction of music and the physicality of dance is subverted by a conceit whereby ‘music’ also functions as a euphemism for sexual relations:

Celia said that if he did not find work at once she would have to go back to hers. Murphy knew what that meant. No more music.

This phrase is chosen with care, lest the filthy censors should lack an occasion to commit their filthy synecdoche.⁴¹

What Catherine Laws has termed ‘the double image of music’⁴² creates something of a crux in Chapter 11.

Late that afternoon, after many fruitless hours in the chair, it would be just about the time Celia was telling her story, MMM [of the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat (where Murphy worked)] stood suddenly for music, MUSIC, MUSIC, in brilliant, brevier and canon, or some such typographical scream, if the gentle compositor would be so friendly. Murphy interpreted this in his favour, for he had seldom been in such need of encouragement.⁴³

The question is whether the ‘music, MUSIC, MUSIC’ is Neary’s, Celia’s or some ambivalent combination of the two. In one sense this moment is quite abstract and formal, and almost autistic in its private interpretation of the alliterative acronym. The notion of music as asylum is itself double-edged, and for Beckett MMM might also have signified Robert Burton’s description of music in The Anatomy of Melancholy as ‘mentis medicina maestae [a roaring-meg against melancholy]’.⁴⁴ On the other hand, the appeal to formal autonomy is made with a kind of expressive excess;⁴⁵ and there are, perhaps, even more personal associations involved here. The ‘typographical scream’ alludes to Lucia Joyce’s talent for illumination, ‘as exemplified in her initial letters to Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach and to the A.B.C. poem of Chaucer’;⁴⁶ and MMM might equally refer to the ‘“Margaret Morris Movement” (M.M.M.)’,⁴⁷ of which Lucia was a member.⁴⁸

The latter possibility would represent a particularly acute conjunction of the music–dance or mind–body duality: Margaret Morris mentioned Lucia in her memoir (partly because of her famous father, though also for her own qualities as a dancer)⁴⁹ and was Lucia’s teacher when Beckett saw her dance at the Bal Bullier on 28 May 1929.⁵⁰ According to Carol Loeb Shloss, ‘Samuel Beckett remembered the excellence of this particular performance and kept his photograph of Lucia in costume for the rest of his life’.⁵¹ Morris’s The Notation of Movement had encouraged some to hope that dance could soon be the equal of absolute music, by providing the sine qua non for the creation of ‘permanent’, ‘detailed and elaborate’ works.⁵² Decades later, however, Morris herself acknowledged its limitations, commenting that ‘it seems to me obvious that any notation of movement can in reality only notate positions and indicate transitions’.⁵³ It is reasonable to speculate that Beckett would have known about the Margaret Morris Movement and that it might have been an important touchstone for him not just in the debate about the relative place of dance and music in the hierarchy of the arts, but also, later, for his own acute concern with issues of notation and authority, text and performance.⁵⁴

‘Dance’ and the ‘Balletic’

Having quoted Beckett’s letter to Morris Sinclair, James Knowlson remarked that,

in spite of this difficulty, it was at this period of [Beckett’s] life that the groundwork for his later interest in choreographing movements on stage was laid. When he came to direct his own plays in the 1960s and 1970s, he brought to his task the intense concentration and meticulous precision of the choreographer.⁵⁵

Beyond Lucky’s dance in En attendant Godot (on which more later), several Beckett works could indeed be described as dances: Acte sans paroles (1955) was ‘directed and danced by Deryk Mandel (Man), for whom it was written’⁵⁶ and has been called ‘a ballet without music’;⁵⁷ ‘Quad was composed for the Stuttgart Preparatory Ballet School and performed there in June 1981’,⁵⁸ and ‘no questions arise if we consider Quadrat as a ballet’.⁵⁹ A work such as Footfalls (1975) is a borderline case: Billie Whitelaw has written that the movements Beckett induced her to make in rehearsals ‘started to feel like dance’.⁶⁰ The ‘mimed fugue’⁶¹ of What Where (1983), with its diagrammatic movements, also blurs the boundary between drama and dance. But ‘dance’ also occurs as a metaphor in discussions of Beckett’s non-theatrical works, including Murphy, and it is noteworthy that, when it does, it has the curious effect of rendering the subject not more corporeal but more abstract.

Hugh Kenner says that Murphy and Endon’s final chess-game⁶² ‘enacts, as in a ballet, Murphy’s fascination with the rituals of the “higher schizoids”, and his imperfect grasp of their satisfactions’;⁶³ while John Robert Keller calls it ‘a complex dance of isolation and attempts at engagement’,⁶⁴ which ‘in a sense … is a precursor for the dance between Sam and Watt, which also develops an ambiguity of isolation within contact, and the late piece Quad’.⁶⁵ Of Human Wishes (1940), Beckett’s unfinished play about Dr Johnson’s circle, Ruby Cohn suggests that ‘Beckett could not resolve the conflict between the psychological drama he had painstakingly prepared himself to write and the verbal ballet he actually began to write’.⁶⁶ Stan Gontarski speaks of the ‘paranoid ballet’ of the protagonist in Eh Joe (1965) ‘shuff[ling] about his room […] to shut out prying eyes’;⁶⁷ Georg Hensel describes the joining and unjoining of hands in Come and Go (1965) as ‘a little ballet of human relations’;⁶⁸ and Sidney Homan similarly emphasizes the ‘complex, highly stylized “ballet of hands” (as someone called it) between B and L’⁶⁹ in Nacht und Träume (1982). Discussing Beckett’s late prose work Company (1979), H. Porter Abbott describes how its meditation on a watch is ‘defamiliarized to the monotonous circular ballet of the second hand and its shadow’.⁷⁰ Whereas earlier we saw the bodily realities of dance contrasted with the implied purity of absolute music, here dance (especially as exemplified by ballet) is invoked to capture a scene of troubled and troubling communication, somehow emphasizing the lack of real connection and contact. Just as when Wittgenstein writes ‘piano playing, a dance of human fingers’, the effect is not (as one might think) to bring a somewhat intellectual activity within the ambit of the corporeal, but instead to add yet another layer of abstraction, to divorce the mind from the movement of muscles in order to contemplate it as a purely formal play.⁷¹

This is not simply a slippage between literal reference to embodied movement and the use of ‘dance’ as a metaphor, but the fact that all the Beckettian ‘dances’ (both actual and metaphorical) are inhibited or troubling in some way and that the range of the dance metaphor as applied to Beckett has narrowed to mean something formal or abstract. To some extent, this emphasis is inspired by Beckett’s 1975 revival of Waiting for Godot at the Schiller Theater, Berlin, as documented by Walter Asmus.

[Saturday 28 December 1974]

With each sentence Beckett makes a step toward the imaginary partner. Always a step, then the sentence. Beckett calls this a step-by-step approach, a physical theme, which comes up five, six, or seven times and has got to be done very accurately. This is the balletic side of the story. Lucky falls twice, and this mustn’t be done realistically, but very cleanly.

Beckett: ‘It is a game, everything is a game. When all four of them are lying on the ground, that cannot be handled naturalistically. That has got to be done artificially, balletically. Otherwise, everything becomes only an imitation, an imitation of reality.’⁷²

Somehow, through précis and repetition,⁷³ the notion of the ‘balletic’ in Beckett Studies has subtly changed, from ‘artificial’, ‘not realistic’ or ‘not naturalistic’ to an almost exclusive emphasis on the ‘accuracy’ part of the metaphor.

[Lois Oppenheim:] Why do you use the word ‘choreography’ in connection with Beckett’s plays?

[Walter Asmus:] Because Beckett himself, when directing Godot in Berlin, used the word ‘balletic’ in the context of the actors’ movements. But I think the words ‘balletic’ and ‘choreography’ shouldn’t be overvalued. It was not that Beckett wanted them to move like ballet dancers. It was simply to express the exactitude, and that there was a design in the blocking that had a meaning.⁷⁴

Since this meaning is never spelt out, one is left simply with the ‘exactitude’ – somehow all the more exacting because indeterminate or at least verbally inexpressible. Perhaps we are instead in danger of undervaluing the ‘ballet’/‘choreography’ metaphor in seeing it as a straightforward synonym for ‘exactitude’, to the neglect of all the other facets – beauty, grace, expression, vivacity, to name but a few – that it embraces.

‘Any discussion of this kind of stage movement,’ advises Jonathan Kalb, ‘ought eventually to focus on Endgame (1956), which Beckett has said he prefers to Godot because of the greater exactitude with which its physical activity is planned’.⁷⁵

In Beckett’s Schiller Theatre production of Endgame [1967], Clov’s footsteps back and forth from the kitchen to Hamm’s chair were of a consistent number and pattern and were always rhythmically timed: ‘It’s almost like a dance’, says Beckett, ‘equal number of steps, rhythm kept equal.’⁷⁶

The simile works, so far as it goes: it is like a (certain kind of) dance, in that the movements and timing are prearranged – but there is nothing that says even choreographed pieces should be ‘consistent’ or ‘equal’. The exaggeration was perhaps admitted by Beckett by saying that it was ‘almost’ like a dance; but Beckett’s explicators instead take things even further.

He normally had a well-thought-out intellectual rationale behind everything that he did, and, in this case, this may have been provided by his readings in the 1930s in the history of Greek philosophy, which would have supplied him with an additional motivation for his emphasis on repetition and pattern. At rehearsals in Berlin, after organising Clov’s steps from his kitchen to Hamm’s armchair, Beckett referred to the repeated numbers as being ‘Pythagorean’. Clearly what he had in mind was Pythagoras’ theory in which the universe consisted of a harmonious disposition of numbers, based on the perfect number 10. Again, using such repeated patterns as a unifying feature, Beckett organised Clov’s short steps when he is ‘having an idea’ into a series of 6 + 4 + 6 + 4.⁷⁷

There is an irony in the way that, just as Beckett felt the need to provide gestural accompaniment to Clov’s ‘having an idea’, Beckett’s interpreters feel compelled to offer ideas to accompany this organization of movement. The processes of interpretation and explication – a mixture of observation, erudition and supposition – are marshalled because for some unspoken reason it is necessary or desirable not only to ‘describe arabesques’ but to prescribe them in minute detail, both before and after the event. But why did Beckett usually have ‘a well-thought-out intellectual rationale behind everything that he did’, if indeed he did, or why do we need him to have needed one?

Let Him Dance

To explore these questions, we need to focus not (as Kalb suggests) on Endgame but on Waiting for Godot, the source of the maxim quoted at the beginning of this chapter:

POZZO: Well, would you like him to think something for us?

ESTRAGON: I’d rather he’d dance, it’d be more fun?

POZZO: Not necessarily.

ESTRAGON: Wouldn’t it, Didi, be more fun?

VLADIMIR: I’d like well to hear him think.

ESTRAGON: Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards, if it isn’t too much to ask him.

VLADIMIR: [To POZZO.] Would that be possible?

POZZO: By all means, nothing simpler. It’s the natural order. [He laughs briefly.]

VLADIMIR: Then let him dance.

[Silence.]

POZZO: Do you hear, hog?⁷⁸

Even allowing for the common practice of attributing to a writer words that he or she has put into the mouth of a fictional character, the transformation of this ironic and disturbing scene into the straightforwardly univocal motto ‘Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.’ is something of a travesty. There is nothing permissive or expressive about Lucky’s dance, the scene instead being one of exploitation and abuse.⁷⁹ Pozzo’s brief laugh at his notion of ‘natural order’ hints at a possible oxymoron, but perhaps the desire to give (or receive) orders does indeed come naturally to man.

VLADIMIR: Tell me to dance.

ESTRAGON: I’m going.

VLADIMIR: Dance, hog! [He writhes.]⁸⁰

Thus, in Act II, Vladimir orders Estragon to give him an order, and, when Estragon refuses, Vladimir resorts to ordering (and obeying) himself. Vladimir’s ‘let him dance’ is no signal to let Lucky off the leash, either metaphorically or literally, having more the sense of ‘make him dance’.

Ironically, as others have noted, hardly anyone thinks about Lucky’s dance itself.

In her discussion, [Toby] Zinman (1995) points out its isolation: there are minimal stage directions,⁸¹ it was rarely discussed by Beckett or by actors who performed it, and it is rarely mentioned by critics. I agree, of course, with her assertion that the dance is a ‘work of art and as such it is a non-verbal, miniature version of the play itself’ (Zinman, 1995: 311.⁸² In a sense, the primal importance of the dance has been re-enacted in its non-discussion.⁸³

Those discussions that do exist are concerned principally with interpretations of Vladimir and Estragon’s attempts to guess what the dance is called (‘The Scapegoat’s Agony’, ‘The Hard Stool’) and of Pozzo’s revelation of the answer (‘The Net’).⁸⁴ Their attempts to understand the non-verbal by means of the verbal are to some extent inevitably futile – and yet we too have no choice but to participate. Zinman cites the English proverb ‘to dance in a net’ and its origin (‘Think not you are undetected. You dance in a nett, and you think no body sees you’).⁸⁵ However, a more specifically Beckettian source might be Kleist’s essay on the marionette theatre, in which ‘an invisible and incomprehensible force, like a net of iron, seemed to constrain the free play of [the] gestures’ of a once-graceful adolescent boy upon becoming self-conscious of that grace.⁸⁶ Similarly, one might argue, Beckett’s own authorial and directorial movements lost something of their original spontaneity as he was reluctantly compelled to determine in what their quality consisted, in order, hopefully, to reproduce them anew.⁸⁷ ‘When [Belacqua] tried to mechanise what was a dispensation he was guilty of an abominable confusion’⁸⁸ – yet this seems to be not only what Beckett found himself doing later in his career but also what earns our greatest admiration.

For a different perspective on this confusion, I want to consider two contrasting examples of dance-as-communication in Beckett: an apparently successful instance, which is perhaps not so, and a seemingly failed instance, which is perhaps more so. The first comes from Happy Days (1961), a work which, despite featuring a middle-aged woman buried up to her waist in earth in Act I and up to her neck in Act II (in a sense proscribing arabesques), was turned into a ballet (L’Heure esquise (1908)) by Maurice Béjart.⁸⁹ In fact, dance does feature in the ‘musical-box tune’ hummed and then sung softly by Winnie at the close of the play:

Though I say not

What I may not

Let you hear,

Yet the swaying

Dance is saying

Love me dear!

Every touch of fingers

Tells me what I know,

Says for you,

It’s true, it’s true,

You love me so!⁹⁰

Despite the cruel irony of Winnie’s situation and the forced character of her attempts at cheerfulness, her rendition of this tune does at least offer a moment of respite or release, of apparent (and un-awful) consolation. However, what ‘the dance is saying’ is not beyond doubt – or, if it is, then it is of doubtful value for that very reason. The waltz from Franz Léhar’s The Merry Widow (1905) is so apt that it is surprising to learn that until quite late in the day Beckett was considering using ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ instead, even asking Alan Schneider which he preferred.⁹¹ Their musical characteristics are similar: both share a lilting triple metre (although The Merry Widow is somewhat more wistful) and evoke a sentimental nostalgia – but what makes The Merry Widow the perfect choice are the words.⁹²

Ostensibly the dance (music/touch) says, unambiguously and superlatively, what words cannot, yet ironically we can only learn that it does so by means of words, and we only have the singer’s word for it. So complete is the communication that one wonders whether it is not in fact redundant: not only does the singer – in this case, Winnie – already know what she is told, but what she is told is the product of her own imagination. The supposed meeting of minds is potentially no more than an illusion, an echo. The pauses and phrasing conditioned by the music (and line-breaks/enjambments) also enable an alternative reading of the first three lines, as a ‘Hiberno-English imperative’ (where ‘let’ can also be used with the second-person pronoun and not just (as in Standard English) with the first- and third-person (‘let’s go’; ‘let him have it’)).⁹³ So, in addition to their primary sense of ‘although I do not say that which I am not allowed to say in your hearing’, the lines could be rendered ‘although I do not say that which I am not allowed to, hear it, nevertheless, as if I do ! ’ Again, the effect is to produce an equivalence – unnerving to those who are invested in the business of interpretation – between the communion of two souls and a delusory monologue.

A contrasting example comes from Molloy (1947, pub. 1951), in the long and justly famous passage where Moran thinks (as he often does) of his bees.

And I thought above all of their dance, for my bees danced, oh not as men dance, to amuse themselves, but in a different way. I alone of all mankind knew this, to the best of my belief.⁹⁴

It is the definition of dance as ‘any patterned, rhythmic movement in space and time’ that ‘enables biologists like Karl von Frisch (in The Dancing Bees (1927, trans. 1954)) to describe the movement patterns of non-human creatures, like bees, as dances’.⁹⁵ Whereas Winnie’s song gave us music with the element of dance deliberately minimized, here is dance without music. Moran is as smitten (by his bees) as Winnie is (by her beloved), if not more so – but he at least hedges his grand claims with multiple caveats. He sets about making sense of the bees’ dance, concluding that it is

a system of signals by means of which the incoming bees, satisfied or dissatisfied with their plunder, informed the outgoing bees in what direction to go, and in what not to go. But the outgoing bees danced too. It was no doubt their way of saying, I understand, or, Don’t worry about me. But away from the hive, and busily at work, the bees did not dance. Here their watchword seemed to be, Every man for himself, assuming bees to be capable of such notions.

The assumption is a significant one, which threatens to undermine Moran’s entire interpretative exercise. Nevertheless, he continues to elaborate it, in a quasi-scientific way, rhetorically recounting how he has ‘classified’ and ‘measured’ a great number of complicated figures, with their ‘probable’ meanings, taking account of ever more ‘determinants’: the ‘figures’, the ‘hum’, the ‘height’ and ‘doubtless other[s] of which [he] had not the slightest idea’ (the admission of ignorance being itself a central pillar of the rational process). In describing his attempts to describe their dance, Moran creates another kind of dance: that of persuasion, although the notional ‘public’ is acknowledged only to be denied.

Ultimately, Moran’s apparent motivation is undone by his own ‘raptur[ous]’ words: ‘Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand’:

And all during this long journey home, when I racked my mind for a little joy in store, the thought of my bees and their dance was the nearest thing to comfort. For I was still eager for my little joy, from time to time! And I admitted with good grace the possibility that this dance was after all no better than the dances of the people of the West, frivolous and meaningless. But for me, sitting near my sun-drenched hives, it would always be a noble thing to contemplate, too noble ever to be sullied by the cogitations of a man like me, exiled in his manhood.

As so often with Beckett’s narrators, definitive meaning proves elusive in the continual and delicate play of ironic humour: as Moran himself might have put it, ‘the purpose of the hum is not to emphasize the dance, but on the contrary to vary it’. The ways in which the passage argues against itself are somehow both obvious and subtle. Moran disparages Western dancing because it is ‘meaningless’, but admires the dance of the bees precisely because it cannot be tainted by human attempts to understand, to attribute, ascribe or create meaning; and yet this very thought, one feels, can only occur to the seemingly lamentable creature called man.

As the young Beckett recognized (in praise of Joyce), it is the ‘endless substantial variations’ which ‘structural convenience[s]’ allow, rather than how little room they leave for manoeuvre, which is to be most valued, the ‘interior intertwining of […] themes into a decoration of arabesques – decoration and more than decoration’.⁹⁶ In the ‘Publisher’s Note’ to Dream of Fair to Middling Women, John Calder recalls how, although Beckett could see nothing but flaws in the 1978 Odéon revival of Waiting for Godot, they ‘eventually repaired […] to a boîte a block or two away where, late in the evening, Beckett actually accepted an invitation to get up and dance’.⁹⁷ Calder’s ‘actually’, like the popularity of my initial quotation, relies on the incongruity not of a disappointed septuagenarian’s dancing, but of Beckett’s dancing per se. Yet like Lucky, ‘He danced. He thought’;⁹⁸ and thought, and danced. There is little point in being permissively prescriptive about their order, natural or otherwise: in Beckett, while there might be no dance without thought, there is rarely a thought that does not dance – or writhe.

¹ Quoted on various websites, including goodreads: <http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/123103>; Reflections of a Rising Humanist: <http://squarelogic.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/dance-first-think-later-its-the-natural-order-samuel-beckett/>; see also Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras, Dance First, Think Later: 618 Rules to Live By (New York, 2011).

² Samuel Beckett to Thomas McGreevy, Thursday [?17 July 1930], in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1: 1929–1940, ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge, 2009), p. 25.

³ Carol Loeb Shloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (New York, 2003), p. 76.

⁴ Beckett does not state this precisely as quoted, though its origins lie in an exchange in Waiting for Godot (see p. 149 below).

⁵ Samuel Beckett to Morris Sinclair (trans. George Craig), n.d. [after 13 July; before 2 Aug. 1934], in Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, p. 215.

⁶ Beckett to Sinclair, 13 July 1934, in Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, p. 216 n. 2.

⁷ Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante…Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London, 1983), pp. 19–33: p. 27.

⁸ For a more specific consideration of literature, dance and Finnegans Wake, see Robert McAlmon, ‘Mr Joyce Directs an Irish Word Ballet’, in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, with Letters of Protest, 2nd edn (London, 1961), pp. 105–16 (esp. pp. 105–6).

⁹ Beckett, ‘Dante…Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’, p. 28.

¹⁰ See Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, pp. 21, 22 n. 2, 24, 28 n. 2, 33, 40–41.

¹¹ Philippe Soupault, Les Neuf Muses: Terpsichore (Paris, 1928), p. 20.

¹² Ibid., pp. 23–4.

¹³ Irina Baronova, ‘Choreartium: An Insight’, Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance 26 (June 2007): 27.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Beckett to McGreevy, 26 July 1936, Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, p. 362.

¹⁶ See Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, p. 314 n. 2.

¹⁷ Constant Lambert, ‘Music and Action’, in Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (eds), What is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism (Oxford, 1983), pp. 203–10 (p. 207).

¹⁸ Also see Francis Sparshott, A Measured Pace: Toward a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance (Toronto, 1995), pp. 496–97 n. 13.

¹⁹ Beckett to McGreevy, 19 Oct. 1958, quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London, 1996), p. 453 (p. 791 n. 40).

²⁰ See Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, pp. 512–16 (p. 514) (Eng. trans. pp. 516–20 (pp. 518–19)).

²¹ See Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women [1932], ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (London, 1996), pp. 106, 229.

²² See Samuel Beckett, ‘What a Misfortune’, in More Pricks Than Kicks [1934] (London, 1993), pp. 125–60: pp. 149–50 and 160.

²³ Beckett to McGreevy, 6 June 1939, Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, p. 660.

²⁴ Beckett to McGreevy, 27 Dec. 1934; 1 Jan. 1935 (Trinity College, Dublin, MS 10402 (passages not included in Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1 (see pp. 235 and 239–42)).

²⁵ See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 191.

²⁶ Beckett to McGreevy, 19 Mar. 1935, Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, pp. 260, 263 n. 9.

²⁷ ’We had a nice Cartesian Infanta in the Kid, inarticulate & stupefied, crossing the stage to Ravel’s Pavane’ (Beckett to McGreevy, 24 Feb. 1931, Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, p. 68).

²⁸ Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann and Robert Hullot-Kentor (London, 2004), p. 6; see also Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge, 2007), p. 160 n. 7. The same point was also made by Havelock Ellis (see The Dance of Life (London, 1923), pp. 57–8).

²⁹ Samuel Beckett, German Diaries, 10 Nov. 1936 (see Roswitha Quadflieg (ed.), Alles kommt auf so viel an: Das Hamburg Kapitel aus den ‘German Diaries’. 2. Oktober–4. Dezember 1936 (Hamburg, 2003), p. 35; see also Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 236. The German artist Franz Radziwill (1895–1983) was an ambivalent figure at that turbulent time.

³⁰ Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 3.

³¹ Ibid., p. 13.

³² Ibid., pp. 13–14.

³³ See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 83; Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore, MD, 2002), p. 170.

³⁴ See Shloss, Lucia Joyce, pp. 85, 121–2.

³⁵ She ‘never looked like being able to play the piano, but she had a curious talent for improvisation’ (Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 14).

³⁶ Ibid., p. 4.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 5.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ See Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London, 1993), p. 6. Murphy’s heart is described as being ‘like Petrushka in his box’; Beckett’s letter to Thomas McGreevy, 22 Sept. 1935, contains a review of Woizikovsky dancing the role (measured against none other than Léonid Massine) (Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, pp. 277–8).

⁴¹ Beckett, Murphy, p. 47.

⁴² See Catherine Laws, ‘The Double Image of Music in Beckett’s Early Fiction’, in Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts and Onno Kosters (eds), Beckett and Religion: Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 9 (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 2000), pp. 295–308 (p. 297).

⁴³ Beckett, Murphy, p. 132.

⁴⁴ Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York, 2001), p. 115 (quoting Lemnius, Instit. cap. 44); see also Samuel Beckett, Dream Notebook, ed. John Pilling (Reading, 1999), p. 114; Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, pp. 38, 85.

⁴⁵ ’Where Apollo fails, Marsyas leaps in, grinning’ (Daniel Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2003), p. 145).

⁴⁶ Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ (London, 1934), p. 195.

⁴⁷ Margaret Morris, My Life in Movement (Garelochhead, Argyll and Bute, 2003), p. ix.

⁴⁸ A fine selection of photographs from Margaret Morris Dancing: A Book of Pictures by Fred Daniels is available at <http://www.a-to-m.com/leftarm/margaret-morris-dancing-photographs-by-fred-daniels/>.

⁴⁹ See Morris, My Life in Movement, p. 65. Incidentally, Morris also remarked that ‘I loved Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, and when someone told me it had been called the “Dancing Symphony” I said I would make this name come true’ (ibid., p. 31).

⁵⁰ See Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 103.

⁵¹ Shloss, Lucia Joyce, pp. 176, 490 n. 43. The music on that occasion was the Marche Militaire by Schubert (see ibid., p. 164), a piece and a form determined by movement that was nevertheless not intended to inspire or to accompany any.

⁵² See H. Levy, ‘Introduction’, to Margaret Morris, The Notation of Movement (London, 1928), pp. 3–5 (pp. 3–4).

⁵³ Morris, My Life in Movement, p. 151.

⁵⁴ Much later, in 1961, Beckett would take up these issues with Igor Stravinsky (the composer of Petrushka, among much else) (see Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography [1978] (London, 1990), p. 581; Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 500).

⁵⁵ Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 194.

⁵⁶ Maurice Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge, MA, 1998), p. 13 n. 2 (my italics).

⁵⁷ Manako Ôno, ‘Actes sans paroles, paroles sans scène’, in Manako Okamuro et al. (eds), Borderless Beckett, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 19 (Amsterdam and New York, 2008), pp. 403–12 (p. 403) (my translation).

⁵⁸ Sidney Homan, Beckett’s Theaters: Interpretations for Performance (London, 1984), p. 246 n. 4. Homan adds, however, that ‘the players are, properly, mimes, not dancers’ (ibid.). Similarly, in Quad, ‘by having the figures accumulate from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 in disciplined, choreographed routines, Beckett sets up expectations for a ritualistic dance. But soon after all four players are present, they begin – incrementally – to disperse, no communal dance having occurred’ (Susan D. Brienza, ‘Perilous Journeys on Beckett’s Stages: Travelling Through Words’, in Katherine H. Burkman (ed.), Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett (London, 1987), pp. 28–49 (p. 47)).

⁵⁹ Hans H. Hiebel, ‘Quadrat 1 + 2 as a Television Play’, in Marius Buning and Lois Oppenheim (eds), Beckett in the 1990s, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 2 (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 1993), pp. 335–43 (p. 341).

⁶⁰ Billie Whitelaw, Billie Whitelaw … Who He? (London, 1995), p. 144.

⁶¹ Albright, Beckett and Aesthetics, p. 7.

⁶² Beckett, Murphy, pp. 136–8.

⁶³ Hugh Kenner, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (Syracuse, NY, 1996), p. 68.

⁶⁴ John Robert Keller, Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love (Manchester and New York, 2002), p. 81.

⁶⁵ Ibid., p. 89 n. 20.

⁶⁶ Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001), p. 106.

⁶⁷ Stanley E. Gontarski, ‘The Business of Being Beckett: Beckett’s Reception in the U.S.A.’, in Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman (eds), The International Reception of Samuel Beckett (London and New York, 2009), pp. 9–23 (p. 21).

⁶⁸ See Julian Garforth, ‘“Beckett, unser Hausheiliger?” Changing Critical Reactions to Beckett’s Directorial Work in Berlin’, in Buning, Engelberts and Kosters (eds), Beckett and Religion, pp. 309–29 (p. 322).

⁶⁹ Sidney Homan, Filming Beckett’s Television Plays: A Director’s Experience (London, 1992), p. 111.

⁷⁰ H. Porter Abbott, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (London and Ithaca, NY, 1996), p. 19; see Samuel Beckett, Company, in Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (London, 1989), pp. 5–52: pp. 47–9.

⁷¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, ed. Georg Henrik von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1998), p. 42.

⁷² Walter D. Asmus, ‘Beckett Directs “Godot”’, trans. Ria Julian, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ (Broomall, PA, 2008), pp. 15–24 (p. 22) (originally published in Theatre Quarterly 5/19 (1975): 19–26).

⁷³ See, for example, Lawrence Graver, Samuel Beckett, ‘Waiting for Godot’, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2004), p. 85; David Bradby, Beckett: Waiting for Godot (Cambridge, 2001), p. 116.

⁷⁴ Quoted in John Fletcher, About Beckett: The Playwright and the Work (London, 2003), p. 147.

⁷⁵ Jonathan Kalb, Beckett in Performance (Cambridge, 1989), p. 39, n. 94.

⁷⁶ James Knowlson, ‘Beckett as Director’, in John Haynes and James Knowlson, Images of Beckett (Cambridge, 2003), p. 133.

⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 133, n. 95.

⁷⁸ Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London, 1986), pp. 11–88: p. 39.

⁷⁹ The brutality comes over more even forcefully in the English translation, there being, for example, no equivalent for ‘hog’ in the French original (see Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot (Paris, 1952), p. 55).

⁸⁰ Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 82.

⁸¹ ‘[LUCKY dances. He stops.] ESTRAGON: Is that all?’ (ibid., p. 39).

⁸² Zinman, ‘Lucky’s Dance in Waiting for Godot’.

⁸³ Keller, Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love, p. 169 n. 16 (quoting T.S. Zinman, ‘Lucky’s Dance in Waiting for Godot’, Modern Drama, 38/3 (1995): 30–23). Keller suggests that ‘it mirrors a core sense of non-recognition, of rupture in the primal dance of life between mother and infant’ (ibid.) – but it is the non-discussion itself rather than its potential causes that is of interest to me.

⁸⁴ See Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 39; Zinman, ‘Lucky’s Dance in Waiting for Godot’, pp. 309–13; Keller, Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love, pp. 153, 169–70 n. 16.

⁸⁵ See Zinman, ‘Lucky’s Dance in Waiting for Godot’; Keller, Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love, pp. 169–70 n. 16.

⁸⁶ Heinrich von Kleist, On a Theatre of Marionettes, trans. Gerti Wilford (London, 1989), p. 8. The boy’s unsuccessful attempts to repeat a certain particularly winning lifting of his foot also prefigure Pozzo’s own almost paralysing pomposity (see ibid., pp. 7–8; cf.: ‘The second is never so sweet …’ – Pozzo (Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 29)).

⁸⁷ Notice, however, that the two suggested sources do not fit squarely together: one assumes that the proverbial ‘net’, like Kleist’s, is (consciousness of) the gaze of the other, whereas in the proverb the net is that of non-awareness of the gaze. In any case, Lucky does not dance ‘in a nett’: his dance is ‘The Net’.

⁸⁸ Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 123.

⁸⁹ See William Hutchings, ‘“In the Old Style,” Yet Anew: Happy Days in the “After Beckett”‘, in Stanley E. Gontarski (ed.), A Companion to Samuel Beckett (Oxford, 2010), pp. 308–25 (p. 318). It is, perhaps, the very way that movement is suppressed or denied which attracts a dancer’s attention, as well as the ritualized and regulated form of all Winnie’s gestures, both physical and verbal.

⁹⁰ Samuel Beckett, Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts, in The Complete Dramatic Works, pp. 137–68: p. 168.

⁹¹ See Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 20 May 1961, in Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served, pp. 82, n. 3.

⁹² In the English adaptation of 1907 by Adrian Ross (Arthur Reed Ropes (1859–1933)).

⁹³ See T.P. Dolan, A Dictionary of Hiberno-English: The Irish Use of English, rev. edn (Dublin, 2004), ‘Introduction to the First Edition’, pp. xxi–xxix (p. xxvi).

⁹⁴ Samuel Beckett, Molloy [1955], trans. Samuel Beckett and Patrick Bowles, in Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London, 1994), pp. 5–176 (pp. 169–70); cf. Samuel Beckett, Molloy [1947, pub. 1951] (Paris, 2002), pp. 228–30.

⁹⁵ Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, ‘What Is Dance?’, in (eds), What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism (Oxford, 1983), pp. 1–9 (p. 1). Since von Frisch’s study was entitled simply Aus dem Leben der Bienen, we should perhaps also credit its English translator, Dora Ilse (Karl von Frisch, The Dancing Bees: An Account of the Life and Senses of the Honey Bee, trans. Dora Ilse (London, 1954)).

⁹⁶ Beckett, ‘Dante…Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’, p. 22.

⁹⁷ John Calder, ‘Publisher’s Note’, to Dream of Fair to Middling Women (New York, 1992), pp. v–x (p. vi); the equivalent note to the Calder edition is briefer and omits this detail.

⁹⁸ Vladimir, in Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 83.