ABSTRACT
James Knowlson’s own summary of the significance of music for Samuel Beckett, and for his writing, runs as follows: music was a constant and important ingredient in Beckett’s life. The allusions cited by Knowlson come from Beckett’s earliest works, Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks. In studies of Beckett’s prose, too, critics at first focused on the more explicit instances of music in Watt and in Murphy. Music was a popular metaphor among Beckett’s critics, but by the end of the 1960s, it had become virtually indispensable. In Beckett’s Dantes, Daniela Caselli observes that “Dante’s love of music is part of the nobility of soul that necessarily characterizes any auctor.” Musico-literary criticism might be in a relatively early stage of its development, and to have come surprisingly late to Beckett—but Beckett himself is an archetypically late-comer to modernism, who self-consciously steered himself in certain directions as a result of what was already in train.
