‘debt of nature’: death, although in Christian terms this is usually seen as the result of sin, and thus not strictly a ‘debt of nature’.
‘post-obit’: Latin ‘after death’. Usually used as a legal term to designate an outstanding issue (often a debt) that takes effect after death.
‘estate’: anticipates the issue of Lord Gall’s estate in the second part of the story.
‘same stream twice’: Heraclitus on the unchanging thrust of time; Beckett read texts by and about Heraclitus in the early 1930s. Cf. Beckett’s ‘Philosophy’ Notebook: ‘For him it is not possible to step down twice into the same stream’ (TCD MS10967, 24r). The idea reappears for example in the poem ‘For Future Reference’ (CP 28), the essay ‘Le Monde et le Pantalon’ (Dis 118) and the postwar story ‘The Expelled’ (9).
‘a true saying’: found in Dream (40), twice in ‘Dante and Lobster’ and in ‘Yellow’ (MPTK 8, 17, 163).
‘Belacqua’: Beckett’s earliest protagonist, the ‘hero’ of Dream and MPTK, based on the Florentine lute-maker of the same name in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Confined in purgatory for indolence, Dante encounters him crouching in the shade of a great rock (Purgatorio IV, 127). Asked by Dante why he is sitting rather than ascending the Mount of Purgatory, Belacqua states, ‘Brother what avails it to ascend?’, believing that he would surely not be allowed to enter Paradise. Notes on Dante’s Belacqua can be found in DN (305, 311, 313, 314, 315). Cf. also the boy in the poem ‘Enueg I’, who refrains from trying to watch the hurling game.
‘dust of the world’: as in the Book of Job, ‘will thou bring me into dust again’ (10:9), or a line from Proverbs (8:26) noted in DN: ‘the highest part of the dust of the world’ (553). Cf. Dream (31, 78) and ‘What a Misfortune’ (MPTK 115).
‘dim spot’ – i.e. ‘Earth’, as defined by the attendant Spirit in Milton’s Comus (ll. 6–7).
‘not all a dream’: one of several allusions to the ‘source’ text which underlies ‘Echo’s Bones’, the (then) unpublished Dream of Fair to Middling Women.
‘quick’: cf. ‘the quick and the dead’ (I Peter 4:5).
‘definite individual existence . . . order of time’: Beckett is here liberally quoting Anaximander from Friedrich Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy (1863–6) (I, 35) as noted in his ‘Philosophy’ Notebook: ‘All things must in equity again decline into that whence they have their origin; for they must give satisfaction and atonement for injustice, each in the order of time’; ‘Definite individual existence constitutes an injustice and must be atoned for by extinction’ (TCD MS10967, 7r).
‘fence’: partly symbolising Belacqua’s state between life and death, partly reflecting his namesake’s position in Dante – neither on one side nor the other, neither going up nor down.
‘casse-poitrine’: the active partner in homosexual fellatio; the word is found among a list of homosexual practices in the DN (481) deriving from Pierre Garnier’s Onanisme seul et à deux (1883) (486). Cf. Dream (20): ‘Casse-poitrinaire’.
‘delicious rêverie’: possibly derived from Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker (see DN 332 and 333).
‘Romeo and Juliet’: Cuban cigar named after Shakespeare’s play; the phrase ‘smoking his cigar’ is included in the list of homosexual practices in DN cited above (481).
‘to revisit the vomit’: ‘As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly’ (Proverbs 26:11). In ‘Proust’ (515), Beckett connects the vomit with habit: ‘Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit’; cf. Waiting for Godot: ‘But habit is a great deadener’ (81).
‘exuviae’: in a letter to Ruby Cohn (4 January 1982) Beckett suggests ‘Exuviae’ as a possible title for a miscellaneous volume of texts, eventually published as Disjecta (1983).
‘cloud of randy pollen’: perhaps by way of Proverbs 16:15, as noted in DN: ‘(Grateful) as a cloud of the latter rain’ (555). Cf. also the ‘cloud of latter rain’ in ‘A Wet Night’ (MPTK 48), Dream (200) and the last line of the poem ‘it is high time lover’.
‘torture chamber, that non-smoking compartment’: Beckett is here recalling his brief stop-over in Nuremberg on his way from Paris to Kassel in April 1931 to see his cousin Peggy Sinclair; viewing the torture chamber in the castle, Beckett took note of the no-smoking signs. This experience also finds its way into Dream (71, 181) and the story ‘Yellow’ (MPTK 164, 174), and is remembered by Beckett on revisiting Nuremberg in March 1937 (‘German Diaries’), and in a letter to Barbara Bray (2 November 1971).
‘Madden prizeman’: A prize established in 1798 by Samuel Madden, awarded to the runner-up in the Trinity College Dublin Fellowship examination. In Beckett’s novel Watt Arsene would have won this prize had he not a boil on his bottom. A ‘maddened prizeman’ also appears in the Addenda to Watt.
‘picking his nose’: taken from Jules Renard’s Journal entry for 11 September 1893: ‘La solitude où l’on peut enfin soigner son nez avec amour’ (‘The solitude in which you can at last lovingly pick your nose’); Beckett annotated the phrase in his personal copy of Renard and copied it into DN (221). Cf. Dream (22, 72, 128).
‘fiasco’: occurs five times in Dream (19, 50, 68, 76, 121); Beckett also used it in a letter to MacGreevy (26 April 1935) with regard to Octave’s impotence in Stendhal’s Armance (and is used here to anticipate the ‘fiasco’ of Lord Gall’s impotence). Later in life Beckett referred to More Pricks Than Kicks as a fiasco. Cf. also the ‘occasions of fiasco’ that Murphy avoids by escaping to the ‘little world’ (178), and ‘at suck first fiasco’ in ‘A Piece of Monologue’ (265).
‘expiation of great strength’: possibly derived from William M. Cooper’s Flagellation and the Flagellants (1870) (12): ‘a dose of birch of great strength’ (DN 341). Expiation of original sin remains an abiding concern in Beckett’s work: ‘I expiate vilely, like a pig’ (The Unnamable).
‘hereditaments’: property or land that can be inherited; hereditaments are divided into corporeal and incorporeal. A further nod toward the second part of the story.
‘predicateless’: from the entry on ‘Mysticism’ in the Encyclopedia Britannica (14th edn.), noted in DN: ‘God: predicateless Being, above all categories’ (607). Cf. Dream 34.
‘triptych’: a work of art separated into three sections, usually applied to panel paintings; in the context of the story, we may also think of the Holy Trinity and Dante’s three-part Divine Comedy.
‘begin . . . at the beginning’: As the King tells Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (ch. 12), and to ‘go on till you come to the end: then stop’.
‘grey shoals of angels’: the source of the phrase is unclear, but has a distinctly Dantean tone, as in Dream: ‘To do this he had to liquidate Limbo, he had to eject the grey angels, and disperse with light the shoal of spirits’ (63). The ‘grey angels’ also appear elsewhere in Dream (44).
‘womb-tomb’: a rhyme used persistently by Beckett.
‘smoother than oil and softer than pumpkins’: quoting the words of Ravisius Textor, infamous rector at the University of Paris in the sixteenth century, on the necessity of whipping the backsides of errant boys; taken from Cooper (426) and noted in DN (386). Cf. Dream 44.
‘grit and glare of his lids on the eyeballs’: partly derived from Renard’s Journal (24 May 1902), as noted in DN: ‘Hawk: trembling like an eyelid over a grain of dust’ (236); Cf. also Dream: ‘eyelid over grit’ (36), and Beckett’s letter to Thomas MacGreevy (18 October 1932): ‘I’m in mourning for the pendu’s emission of semen, what I find in Homer and Dante and Racine and sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind’ (LSB I 134–5).
‘looked into his heart’: echoes the Muse’s admonition in the opening sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney’s sequence Astrophil and Stella: ‘Look in thy heart and write’. Underlined in Beckett’s copy of Legouis and Cazamian’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise (264).
‘soul . . . idly goaded and racked’: quotin
g Augustine (VII, v) (DN 128).
‘serene yet not relaxedly gay . . . children of joys’: the appearance of Zaborovna Privet is based on a long entry in DN, in turn based on Augustine (VIII, xi): ‘Continency: serene, yet not relaxedly gay, honestly alluring me to come, & doubt not; stretching her [sic] forth to embrace me her holy hands full of multitudes of good examples (grave widows & aged virgins), not barren, but a fruitful mother of children and joys; smiling on me with a persuasive mockery’ (158). Beckett subverts Confessions: if the scene marks St Augustine’s conversion, away from a life of sin, then in ‘Echo’s Bones’ Zaborovna tempts Belacqua with sexual desire. Zaborovna’s entry also echoes the appearance of Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
‘to come and doubt not’: as Christ to Thomas, who doubted the Resurrection, but here inverted, since it is of course Belacqua who is ‘resurrected’. Revisited at the end of the story, where Belacqua tries to convince Doyle that he is corporeally present.
‘anile virgin’: Beckett replaces Augustine’s ‘aged’ with ‘anile’, a word which refers to an ‘old woman’ but also plays on the shared etymology of ‘anus’, indicating that she may not be ‘fruitful’.
‘Zaborovna’: Zaborovna’s occupation of prostitute is inscribed in her name, deriving from Russian: ‘zabornyj’ – ‘indecent, coarse’; ‘zaboristyj anekdot’ is a risqué story. As ‘zabor’ means ‘fence’, ‘zabornaja literatura’ is ‘literature of the fence’, or pornography; ‘-ovna’ is a possible feminine ending of Russian patronymics, thus indicating ‘belonging to’. Hence Zaborovna is, to an extent, ‘of the fence’. Most of Beckett’s female characters in Dream and MPTK have names ending with ‘a’.
‘I don’t hear what you say’: related to what Dream calls an ‘aesthetic of inaudibilities’, based on Dante’s ‘chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco (hoarse from long silence)’ (TCD MS10966/1, 1r). Not unlike Virgil in the first canto of the Inferno, Zaborovna appears as an inaudibility.
‘stews’: based on Burton (III, 219); cf. DN: ‘go to the stews or have now & then a snatch as they can come by it’ (899).
‘forty days’: Christ spent forty days in the wilderness (Mark 1:13 and Luke 4:2).
‘nuts and balls . . . low stature of animation’: from Augustine (I, ix), as noted in DN: ‘He transferred his sins from the rats & balls & sparrows of the low stature of childhood’ (79); also used in Murphy (26).
‘we is just an impersonal usage, the Tuscan reflexive’: The impersonal ‘we’ as used in academic writing in many languages, to avoid the overuse of the passive voice and first person singular. Cf. also the narrator in Dream: ‘we, consensus, here and hereafter, of me’ (112). ‘Tuscan’ refers to Dante, born in Florence, the capital city of Tuscany, and more specifically to the Tuscan dialect used in the Divine Comedy.
‘mood . . . of self-abuse’: ‘self-abuse’ here as a kind of grammatical masturbation, in that the Tuscan impersonal ‘si’ can be both passive and reflexive (unlike in standard Italian); it is thus, in a sense, ‘abusing’ itself. Cf. ‘the alleged joys of so-called self-abuse’ (Molloy, 53 and 54).
‘English passive of masochism’: plays on the two meanings of ‘passive’; firstly ‘submissive’, secondly in the passive voice, where the subject of a verb refers to the person or thing receiving the action described; both of which hint at a kind of ‘masochism’; ‘English’ in that the passive voice is more commonly used in the English language than in other European languages.
‘intermissions’: not only a narrative device in Beckett’s early work (including ‘Echo’s Bones’), but part of a larger aesthetic concern with pauses and gaps and silences; cf. for example Dream: ‘The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement’ (138). The idea is also linked to Marcel Proust’s ‘Les Intermittences du cœur’ (‘the intermittences of the heart’), which was the original title of À la recherche du temps perdu, and later became the title of an extended passage of Sodome et Gomorrhe (‘perhaps the greatest passage Proust ever wrote’).
‘roaring-meg . . . weary on the way’: the sentence is largely taken from Burton (II, 115), where music is ‘a roaring-meg against melancholy, a wagon to him that is wearied on the way’ (DN 802). Cf. Dream (38, 85).
‘musical . . . thought’: relates to Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (291): ‘a very musical thought’ (DN 310). A musical ‘pause’ follows in the next line.
‘sparring for an opening’: the first of many phrases based on boxing terminology.
‘something between a caress and a dig in the ribs’: see also Murphy: ‘Thus the form of kick was actual, that of caress virtual’ (65).
‘elevated his mind to God’: from an entry in DN: ‘Quareritur Iº What shall he do who is aware that he is about to experience pollution? R. He shall elevate his mind to God, invoke him, signo cruces se manire, abstain from all voluntary exoneration, renounce the delectation of voluptuousness’ (447), from J. B. Bouvier’s Dissertatio in Sextum Decalogi Praeceptum, et Supplementum ad Tractatum de Matrimonio (1852) (65).
‘Dr Keate of Eton’: reference to the Eton flagellator Dr Keate, paraphrasing Cooper (438): ‘Alas! – said Keate – I cannot guess your name, Boys’ bottoms are so very much the same.’ Similarly, Belacqua cannot remember Zaborovna’s name.
‘Privet’: Zaborovna’s surname is cited for the first time; ‘privet’ is commonly used to refer to shrubs and small trees of the genus ligustrum, often grown to form a hedge. Taken together with her first name, it confirms her status as a hedge-rambler, or prostitute. Also the Russian informal greeting ‘pryvet’.
‘shanghaied now’: more commonly refers to enforced conscription of men as sailors, but used as here in Dream (173).
‘number of babies’: based on Burton (III, 229): ‘looking babies in one another’s eyes’ (DN 907). Cf. Dream (19) and ‘A Wet Night’ (MPTK 62).
‘old man’s desire’: cf. ‘Softer than an old man’s mentula’ (John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, IV, iii) noted in the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook, ‘mentula’ being Latin for ‘penis’.
‘absence of any shadow’: taken from Dante’s Purgatorio, where Virgil’s body has the semblance of a soul and is thus transparent: ‘a me nulla s’adombra’ (‘before me no shadow falls’; III, 28). In a very early manuscript note on his reading of Dante, Beckett wrote ‘Dante’s shadow, Virgil transparent. Seeing only one on ground D. thinks V. gone’ (UoR MS4123, 1v). The Smeraldina in Dream is described as ‘casting no shade, herself shade’ (23).
‘spancels’: rope or fetter for hobbling cattle and horses, often found in Irish folk tales, as well as in W. B. Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight. The word appears in Beckett’s notes from Ernest Jones’s Papers on Psycho-Analysis (1912), in which he cross-references, in a discussion of the ‘Genesis of Symbolism’, his ‘Trueborn Jackeen’ notes: ‘cp. also Trueborn Jackeen and his spancels’ (TCD MS10971/8, 13r). Cf. also Daniel Corkery’s story ‘The Spanceled’, published in 1913.
‘meatus’: meaning ‘opening’ or ‘passage’, the word is noted in the DN, and occurs frequently in Garnier’s Onanisme seul et à deux (476). Cf. Dream 157.
‘golf tee’: a further narrative anticipation, here of Lord Gall. Beckett was a passable golfer.
‘Wipe them’: Taken from J. G. Lockhart’s The History of Napoleon Bonaparte (1829) (470): ‘Tears rushed down the cheeks of Frederick-William as he fell into the arms of Alexander: “Wipe them,” said the Czar’ (DN 56).
‘ardent and sad’: echoing Baudelaire’s definition of beauty in Fusées as ‘quelque chose d’ardent et de triste’.
‘Gilles de Rais’ (1404–40), marshal of France, infamous for kidnapping and torturing small boys in his pursuit of alchemy and necromancy. If there are a ‘number of babies’ in Zaborovna’s eyes, in Belacqua’s eyes there is the opposite, Gilles de Rais’s dead children. Beckett will have learnt of de Rais during his reading of Mario Praz’s La carne, la
morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (1930; English tr.: The Romantic Agony). His ‘orbs’ also appear in Dream (79).
‘strangury’: slow, painful urination, evoked by the syntax of this line; the word also appears in ‘Ill Seen Ill Said’ (81).
‘wilful waste’: ‘brings woeful want’, as the proverb has it.
‘paps’: breasts; DN has ‘turgent paps’ (845), from Burton (III, 89). Cf. Dream (50).
‘nun of Minsk’: a ‘sad story’ discussed by Cooper in his Flagellation and Flagellants and noted by Beckett in DN (407); unwilling to renounce Roman Catholicism and convert to the Orthodox Church, the Basilian nuns of Minsk were deported to Siberia in the 1870s and placed in a convent where they were reduced to servants and subjected to floggings.
‘cold as January’: in Burton, Sophocles was as cold as January (III, 301); changed by Beckett in DN to Socrates (968). Cf. Dream 61.
‘no more capable . . . than Alfieri or Jean-Jacques of dancing a minuet’: in his Autobiography (mentioned in Beckett’s application of 22 July 1932 for a reader’s ticket at the British Museum), Vittorio Alfieri admits that he ‘abhorred’ dancing, a fact exasperated by his dislike of his French dancing master, so that he never knew ‘how to dance half a minué’ (51); Jean-Jacques Rousseau admitted that despite being ‘very well made, I could never learn to dance a minuet’, as he was plagued by corns (Confessions V).
‘drown the babies’: from Burton (III, 229). Cf. DN (907).
‘surface to breathe’: in his review of Leishman’s translations of Rainer Maria Rilke, Beckett speaks of the German poet ‘always popping up for the gulp of disgust to rehabilitate the Ichgott’ (Dis 66).