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Goethe." By suggesting that Beckett is mocking Goethe’s “pure man,” John
Bolin does not acknowledge the significance of its Taoist source, whereas
Lidan Lin has more accurately suggested that what Beckett “exhibits here is
his clever appropriation of Taoist ethics and his extremely creative conflation
of such ethics and his own postmodern ideal.””® The source for the Taoist “pure
man” has, hitherto, only been identified by Lin. Her assertion that “Beckett
imagines himself acting as a Taoist pure man in writing Dream, the pure
man in this case being the purist writer” provides a new insight into Beckett’s
creative intentions.*° Although her work proposes only an “encounter”
between Beckett and the East, this essay argues that Beckett’s engagement
with the Sinic world was more profound and abiding. An understanding of
Beckett’s use of Chinese sources can be elucidated further if we consider the
influence of Chuang-Tzu’s “pure men of old” and Laloy’s “little story about
China” alongside one another.
Whilst Laloy’s mythological account of the Chinese invention of music
offers the ideal narrative model for Dream, Chuang-Tzu’s ancient mysticism
provides the foundation for Beckett’s authorial desideratum. The narrator
of Dream suggests that in order to “write a little book that would be purely
melodic,” the characters should “be cast for parts in a liü-liü,” an idea that
is echoed by Beckett’s desire for writers and heroines to act like pure men
of old.*! When these two Chinese sources are read in conjunction, Beckett’s
literary model begins to unfold: aesthetic works of “purely melodic” prose,
in which characters, as well as the authors who create and “cast” them, draw
“deep breaths”, act “without calculation,” and fail “with no cause for regret.”
Viewed in the new light of Laloy and Giles’s Chinese influence, Beckett’s
oeuvre can be read as a comic exploration of man’s failure to achieve these
Eastern paragons, as “an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence.”??
Whilst, according to Robert Cushman’s 1976 review, That Time is nothing
more than “a re-run of Krapp’s Last Tape without the props,” there are central
aesthetic differences between the two plays.** This dismissal of the later play as
“a process of refinement but not necessarily enrichment” overlooks Beckett’s
movement towards his desired Chinese aesthetic, a dramatic and formal
“ablation of desire.” In fact, the removal of props and the refined action of
the later work is suggestive of the playwright’s enriching movement towards
Beckett: Dream, 178; my emphasis.
29 John Bolin: Beckett and the Modern Novel, Cambridge, Cambridge University, 2013, 15;
Lidan Lin: Chinese Music as a Narrative Model, English Studies, Vol. 91, No. 3 (2010), 300.
Lin: Encounter, 299.
31 Beckett: Dream, 10. The lid-lit are bells or pipes that form a scale of eleven successive fifths.
See Louis Laloy: La Musique Chinoise, trans. Laura D. Hawley, Hollywood, W. M. Hawley
Publications, 1993, 24.
2 Beckett: Three Dialogues, 141.
33 Robert Cushman: In a Hellish Half Light, Observer, 23 May 1976.
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