ABSTRACT

As we shall see, debates concerning the relationship between music and dance were particularly animated during Beckett’s formative years and important for his own artistic development. In his early fiction, they emerge as reflections on the relationship between the mind and the body and, specifically, on attempts to control one with the other, revealing a certain unease which no amount of irony can fully mask. Later, Beckett’s own plays would set out certain (and uncertain) movements, and ‘choreography’ and ‘ballet’ would become useful metaphors for describing Beckett’s work as a whole. However, both the movements and the metaphor are, I shall argue, curiously one-dimensional – as if the only way Beckett (and Beckettians) could reconcile dance with music or body with mind was to pursue precisely this sort of parallelism, with music/mind the leading partner in their respective pairs. Elsewhere, though, Beckett’s works seem to guard against the need to ‘describe arabesques’ with complete command, with the inability of thought or language to do so being accepted as inevitable and even welcome.