In 1928 James Joyce asked Samuel Beckett to contribute to Our Exagmination Round his Factification. Joyce had invented the playful Latinate title for a collection of essays he was editing about the work that eventually became Finnegans Wake. Among the twelve contributors were William Carlos Williams, Marcel Brion and Stuart Gilbert. The least reverent of the disciples, Robert McAlmon, wondered whether Joyce's wordplay was provoked by glaucoma.
Eager to take on his critics, Joyce stood behind, as he put it, "those twelve Marshals more or less directing them what lines of research to follow." An eager young intellectual from Dublin on a two-year stay in Paris, Beckett was proud to be included in the master's inner circle. His assignment was to explain Joyce's debt to Dante, Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico. "I had worked on Dante, of course," he later wrote.
But Beckett knew very little about Bruno and Vico, sixteenth- and eighteenth-century Italian philosophers who had influenced Joyce. He read up on them in the library of the École normale supérieure where he taught English.
Beckett and Joyce, who went for long walks together along the Seine, agreed that the title for Beckett's essay should be "Dante ... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce." The precise number of dots following Dante and Vico's names indicated the passage of time. As Beckett put it, "From Dante to Bruno is a jump of about three centuries, from Bruno to Vico about one and from Vico to Joyce about two." In his essay, Beckett states, "if you don't understand it, ladies and gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it." On the difference between Dante's Purgatory and Joyce's, Beckett writes "Dante's is conical and consequently implies culmination. Mr. Joyce's is spherical and excludes culmination."
Our Exagmination enjoyed a nearly invisible succès d'estime. "With a little more detachment," Frank O'Connor wrote, "[it] would have been first-rate criticism."
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