Seite 48 [48]
SAMUEL BECKETT AND THE SINIC WORLD
technique of “painting the void, ‘in fear and trembling."" He then added the
significant sentence, which in some ways anticipates Beckett’s artistic oeuvre:
“his concern was at one time with the creation of a mythology; then with man,
not simply in the universe, but in society; and now ... ‘inner emptiness, the
prime condition, according to Chinese esthetics, of the act of painting’.”"
The parallels that can be drawn between Masson’s movement and Beckett’s
own artistic career are intriguing; these range from his quasi-Joycean creation
of the mythological Belacqua Shuah in his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling
Women (hereinafter Dream), to the struggles of solipsistic man in Murphy
and finally to his increasing fascination with “the prime condition” of “inner
emptiness” in the late dramatic works such as That Time. The above quotation
from Three Dialogues highlights Beckett’s awareness of Masson’s affinity with
the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, and that the idea of painting, or creating
an “inner emptiness,” was crucially associated with a “Chinese esthetic.” Here,
Masson’s artistic objective, which aspires to an ideal Buddhist state of “inner
emptiness,” has an affinity with Beckett’s “dream of an art unresentful of its
insuperable indigence and too proud for the farce of giving and receiving.”'?
This “Chinese esthetic” of emptiness is voiced at the end of That Time, as the
speaker acknowledges that the narrative is just “another of those old tales to
keep the void from pouring in on top of you.”
Two important and relatively overlooked sources, which Beckett read in the
late 1920s and early 1930s as he prepared to write Dream, significantly shaped
the young writer’s early understanding of Eastern thought and mythology.
Firstly, the meta-narrator of Dream tells “a little story about China,” which
is a translation from Louis Laloy’s La Musique Chinoise.“ The mythological
tale describes how “Ling-Litin,” a fictional Chinese “minister,” discovered
the musical scale in ancient China by cutting “eleven stems” of bamboo
to correspond with the notes sung by the male and female phoenix." That
Beckett used this translated anecdote to adumbrate his ideal model of the
novel is shown by Catherine Laws: “through the Chinese metaphor (and the
consequent, idiosyncratic elaboration of analogies with melodic and harmonic
structures, intonation and Pythagorean tuning), music is presented as an
idealised model of what this novel might aspire towards but cannot achieve.”!°
Despite the important recognition of music as “an idealised model,” however,
10 Beckett: Three Dialogues, 139.
Hu Ibid., 139.
12 Tbid., 141.
1 Beckett: That Time, 390.
4° Samuel Beckett: Dream of Fair to Middling Women, eds.: Eoin O’Brien — Edith Fournier,
Dublin, The Black Cat, 1992, 10.
15 Ibid., 10.
16 Catherine Laws: Beckett and Unheard Sound, in Daniela Caselli (ed.): Beckett and Nothing,
Manchester, Manchester University, 2010, 180.
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