Abstract

This chapter explores the ways in which Giacomo Leopardi's presence in the manuscripts of Beckett's war-time novel Watt draws the text's Big House pastiche into a pan-European, pessimistic-Romantic tradition sceptical of logic and reason as fundamentally positive human qualities. In doing so, this chapter examines how Beckett's invocation of Leopardi is vital to an underlying political parody in Watt and its manuscripts that takes stock of the troubling relationship between Enlightenment rationality and the barbarism of European fascism.

Keywords: Samuel Beckett; Giacomo Leopardi; W. B. Yeats; Second World War; pessimism; Enlightenment

Samuel Beckett's novel Watt had a turbulent genesis. Begun during the Second World War, the novel went through several phases of composition, from scattered notes to at least two stages of heavy revision of both plot and characters. The Watt notebooks, held in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, evidence a writing process that both obsessed and frustrated its author.

Before the familiar Watt and Mr Knott entered the story, Beckett's tale centred on an Irish Big House in decline and the trials and tribulations of its owner, James Quin, the last of a long line of aristocrats whose family have succumbed to various ailments and illnesses. Beckett's turn in Watt and its preceding manuscripts to an ironic revision of the Big House novel during the war has been convincingly argued by scholars as a form of historical negotiation that works through the obsessions with order and hierarchy shared (in very different forms) between European fascism and the Anglo-Irish Ascendency ideology of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly as formulated by W. B. Yeats. In these readings, the ‘comic attack on rationality’ typically associated with Watt takes on subtle, interconnected political dimensions.

Crucial to the satire of the Big House that runs through the manuscripts and into the published novel is the pervading sense of emptiness at the heart of seemingly urgent matters, whether it is Quin's family decline or Watt's desperate attempts to uncover the puzzles of the Knott household. This is at its starkest in the manuscripts, where Quin is described as one hounded by ‘nothingness’ in his life, a condition that seems to derive in part from his lack of family but also from his failed attempts to educate himself in European literature and philosophy.

Abstract

This paper will examine Beckett's lifelong interest in Romance literature and troubadour poetry, and its relation to Italy, beginning with the recalling of some features and lasting effects of his early love affairs with Ethna MacCarthy and Peggy Sinclair. Furthermore, troubadour lyric poetry will be examined as serving Beckett in his search for a poetic language for modernity, which therefore will be set also against the background of key figures of modernism, such as Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. References to Beckett's poetic work – which spans from the 1930 ‘Whoroscope’ poem to ‘What is the word’, written shortly before his death – focus on the 1930 lyric collection of Echo's Bones and on how its themes and forms anticipate Beckett's succeeding works.

It will also be contented that the temporal gaps in the poetic output of a long and consistent poetic production are in fact filled through the diffusion and absorption of the lyric mode in Beckett's dramatic and novelistic production, with specific references to Molloy and the Dantean character of Sordello.

Keywords: Beckett; poetry; troubadour; Echo's Bones; modernism; Sordello; Molloy

Drawing on the seminal work on Beckett's poetry by Laurence Harvey, this paper will examine Beckett's lifelong interest in troubadour poetry, emphasizing how that is, to some degree, also related to Italy. Such an argument will entail examining Beckett's interest in early Romance literature in conjunction with some key figures of modernism, against which his own stance is to be set and interpreted. Additionally, we will touch upon how his interest is manifested not only in a consistent lyric production throughout his whole career but also in the lyric mode of his novelistic production, with specific references to Molloy.

Recalling some biographical details might help define Beckett's bend towards Romance culture, particularly to that of the Middle Ages. It is well known that Thomas Rudmose-Brown, his college teacher of French, was also an admirer of Provençal language and literature, and affiliated with Félibrige, an association that aimed to renew the memory and modern relevance of the old literature and even bring back in use the old language.

Abstract

This article traces the Italian influences in Beckett's radio plays, beginning with Dante's Divine Comedy and its intertextual significance for All That Fall, Embers and Rough for Radio II in particular. In the next step, these texts are further analysed, together with Words and Music, against the historical backdrop of the Second World War, when radio broadcasting contributed significantly to the rise of Fascism in Europe. Finally, I will read Cascando through a biographical lens, in light of Beckett's 1959 trip to Sorrento, where he attended the Italia Prize awards ceremony accompanied by BBC producer Donald McWhinnie. In doing so, on the one hand, the chapter shows how Beckett used Dante to gradually develop a generic radiophonic space that is marked by a lack of sight and dissociated from any specific geography or nationality. On the other hand, it illustrates how this seeming universality is, at the same time, infused with different cultural contexts that merge almost beyond the point of recognizability. These frameworks are not limited to Ireland, which permeates the early radio plays especially, or France, Beckett's permanent home that put him at further remove from his native country in linguistic terms. Germany, which he visited throughout his career, and by extension Italy, where he spent the least time, should not be neglected as crucial in-between spaces that help to navigate the seeming no man's land of Beckett's later radio plays.

Keywords: Broadcasting; radio drama; Italia Prize (Prix Italia); Dante; Fascism

The influence of Italian culture on Beckett's writing has typically been considered from the following angles: his formal study of the language and its literature at Trinity College Dublin from 1923 to 1927, the private lessons he started taking with Bianca Esposito in 1926, his trip to Florence during the summer of 1927 and his lifelong engagement with the Divine Comedy. This chapter seeks to expand that focus by concentrating on Beckett's radio plays, beginning with Dante and his intertextual significance for All That Fall, Embers and Rough for Radio II. In the next step, I will dwell some more on the latter two, expanded with Words and Music, to situate these works in the historical context of the Second World War, when broadcasting contributed to the spread of Fascism in Europe.

The section of U.S. Highway 93 North that runs through the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana spans approximately 56 miles, from about Evaro, MT, in the south, to Polson, MT, in the north. This north-south stretch of U.S. 93 Highway cuts right through one of Montana's primary east-west wildlife migration corridors and, in doing so, “runs through large expanses of wildlife habitat, including the Mission Mountains, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, and the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area,” thus fragmenting these habitats and making improved connectivity a priority in this area. Recent infrastructure and corridor-related work along this stretch of highway has helped to restore connectivity in this area and has benefited ecosystems, people, and wildlife in the process.

Just outside of the Evaro area, near Arlee, along Highway 93, travelers will come across what is known as the “Animals’ Trail,” or a 197-foot-wide vegetated bridge, which allows wildlife to safely cross over the highway. The overpass itself is most visible along this stretch of highway; however, it is but one of many wildlife crossings along Highway 93. In short, the wildlife-friendly structures in this area represent the joint efforts of the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT), Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT), and Federal Highways Administration (FHWA), which worked together to build this infrastructure not only to reduce human-wildlife traffic accidents but also to protect wildlife migration routes. The project was first proposed in 1989 by the MDT, which wanted to expand this section of U.S. 93 into a four-lane highway. The expansion, however, would have extended into the Flathead Indian Reservation, home to the CSKT. Eventually, the FHWA, MDT, and CSKT convened and “established a tri-governmental team to reach an agreement. From that process came a radical idea: instead of focusing on how the road will impact the land, focus on how the land should shape the road. The team called this approach a ‘Spirit of Place.’” These groups worked together productively to improve connectivity in ways that not only increased human safety but were also sensitive to the needs of wildlife, in particular by incorporating traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and respect for the land, through its focus on the “spirit of place,” which “takes into account the surrounding mountains, plains, hills, forests, valleys, and sky.

Islands have historically been perceived as objects of fascination, locations of romance and adventure, as an ‘allegory of the whole world’ or as ‘the quintessential sites for experimentation’. In real life and online, they may be ‘blank spaces’ in which an owner/occupier develops a culture – landscapes, architecture, values and social practices – that are distinctive, albeit without regard for the values or even life of that space's indigenous inhabitants. They may be edenic or dystopian. They may instead be locations that over time have been remade as reflections of the development of other spaces.

The archipelago of islands in New Horizons represent a cultural stage, shaped both by the hard and soft law discussed in the following chapter and by scope for expression on the part of players, including individuals and corporate entities that are seeking to influence the behaviour of people offline. The cultures evident across the archipelago can accordingly be understood as manifestations of personal autonomy (including performativity of attributes that might otherwise be expressed offline), a Japan-inflected aesthetic and a relief from or reinforcement of the rigours of a global market economy. The stage can also be understood as a subject for academic discontent regarding economic relationships offline, viewing a playscape as an allegory of contemporary capitalism.

Defoe's Island

On a superficial viewing each island – and Animal Crossing islands per se – are potentially blank spaces for inscription through the tastes and engagement of each user, an echo of Daniel Defoe's inf luential 1719 fantasy Robinson Crusoe in which a castaway, a dog, two cats and subservient person of colour remake a deserted island through strenuous effort, ingenuity and good fortune. They are not what Elizabeth Nyman characterised as ‘containers’ from which a player's might want to escape or instead use an opportunity for demonstrating prowess in gaining rewards through killing/disabling hostile characters.

Players enter the game by choosing attributes for their avatar, discussed below, and fictively purchasing the ‘Deserted Island Getaway Package’ from the virtual world's Nook Inc development company. Purchase from a company rather than from a state can be seen as friendlier and less ‘colonial’ than acquiring a licence from a government for occupation and economic development.

Abstract

Dante, and particularly the Commedia, best represents the ubiquity of Italy in Beckett's oeuvre, providing an intellectual scaffolding and a suite of structuring images in texts ranging from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Worstward Ho. Italian words and literary allusions also arise at significant points in Beckett's texts, such as ‘lick chops and basta’ at the end of Ill Seen Ill Said, or the cluster of references to Giacomo Leopardi in the Watt manuscript notebooks. One significant Italian allusion is that of the Pantheon in Rome in All Strange Away as an architectural model for the confined space in which the two bodies are observed by the narrator. It is not the only reference to Roman or Italian architecture in Beckett's work – the Villa Doria Pamphili is mentioned in the Watt notebooks, and the Basilica di San Marco in Venice appears briefly in Dream. However, the Pantheon holds a special place in Beckett's architectural vision, not merely due to its exemplary design but as a focal point for Beckett's enduring preoccupation with modes of interment. The figures in All Strange Away are entombed in their suffocating space, which is likened to the ‘beehive tombs’ or Bronze Age tholoi of Greece and Western Asia, and which also recall the medieval monastic clocháns of southwestern Ireland. The Pantheon is situated between these epochal designations and connects them, casting its singular formal perfections across a history of burial, entombment and memorialization. That this particular building is tied so closely to memory and imagination – and their potential extinctions – bestows it with its own memorial function. It becomes an allusion marking a site of remembrance from which careful excavation will exhume textual relics from the living soil into the life-giving air. This essay will explore how the Pantheon, including its history and structure, anchors this terrain across Beckett's work. It will weigh up how Beckett's architecture of interment pivots on sacred places and their proneness to profanation, and how these sites constitute memorial markers that enable loss to dim into forgetting.

Keywords: Pantheon; architecture; tomb; tumulus; dome; masonry; stone

Italy and Italian culture provide some of the most prominent guides to the thematic and aesthetic formations in Beckett's work.

In Voltaire's 1759 Candide, the title character after many adventures and tribulations concludes that happiness is a matter of cultivating your garden rather than seeking fortune and glory, an echo of unheeded advice to Roman politician Cicero by his friend Atticus. Candide's erstwhile mentor Dr Pangloss, more generally known for pronouncement that we live in the best of all possible worlds, endorses that sentiment in claiming that ‘when man was put into the garden of Eden, it was with an intent to dress it: and this proves that man was not born to be idle’.

Preceding chapters have suggested that Animal Crossing as a virtual garden and a small virtual world (an archipelago of private islands in cyberspace where there are rules, social interaction, a simulated natural environment and a built environment) rewards those players who in rejecting idleness engage in what might be characterised as cultivation: selection, placement, display, harvesting and enhancement for pleasure or as the basis for greater capability in world making.

The activity of players might instead be characterised as a matter of curation. Critic Jens Hoffmann comments that:

Hoffmann's characterisation offers several perspectives for understanding the game as a source of pleasure and New Horizons as a simulation of an economy: sufficiently real to be engaging but not so real as to generate the inequalities, exploitation, aggression, unhappiness and contestation evident in all real-life economies.

Animal Crossing is a commercial product from a corporation with global scale, intended to provide Nintendo with a superior return on investment, one greater than the returns from savings accounts during periods when Japanese interest (and national growth) rates were very low following the collapse of the property bubble. As preceding paragraphs have suggested, the New Horizons business model is a matter of persuading people to recurrently engage in curation. Buy the game, play the game, pay subscription fees and buy amiibo or other collectables.

All cultural production – whether a matter of manufacturing (artisanal or industrial) or performance – is grounded. It might be attractive to people across the world and across time, whether for innate qualities or because it is recognised as a valued commodity. However, it has a physical and institutional basis: a location within one or more jurisdictions (national and/ or provincial legal systems) with social norms and enforceable rules about activity, irrespective of whether it is perceived as ‘disembodiment’ in a globally networked virtual world. It also has a genealogy – a point of origin, adaptation and reception over time – and may have an aura, perceptions that it is unique or otherwise valuable rather than so omnipresent and so functional as to be unrecognised.

Animal Crossing is a virtual world in which the interaction between live humans and digital characters is online but, like all virtual worlds, the game is tethered to the real world of capital, national/international law and past practice. That world can be considered simply and persuasively as a matter of delight or entertainment, without reference to the scholarship noted in preceding pages of this book. It can however be contextualised by considering its owners – how it came about – and its users and observers, in other words its audiences and critics, theorists or financial analysts who write about it. In understanding Animal Crossing as a large-scale commercial game, an artificial paradise that is a manifestation of corporate decisionmaking rather than a freak of nature, we can start by looking at that world's creator: Nintendo.

That consideration is analogous to exploring paintings, novels, operas and symphonies by looking at the creators (some market oriented, others not; some self-consciously avant-garde, others more conservative), intermediaries and consumers (some of whom, for example, sought visual aids for religious devotion and others, centuries later, engaged in status competition through purchase and gifting to museums or sought to satisfy a deep-seated hunger through amassing objects).

This chapter accordingly considers Animal Crossing as a matter of genealogies and materiality: where the virtual world came from, where does it fit in the spectrum of immersive online games, who are the gamers and why do they play.

This chapter brings together the concepts, philosophies, and case examples throughout the book to consider a working set of best practices and new theoretical directions for wildlife corridor and connectivity projects. As we consider the theories and illustrative examples that this book has outlined, it is clear that connectivity projects are highly context-dependent in terms of the landscapes, communities, and stakeholders involved. Even so, as I hope the explorations in this book have shown, it is possible to identify a productive path forward for corridor projects—namely, one that privileges coexistence and engages more directly with theories and practices that involve compassionate conservation, empathy, and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK).

In the Introduction, I acknowledged that wildlife corridors can be defined in different ways depending on the context, may occur naturally or be human-made, and can happen at different levels of scale. On the whole, wildlife corridors “provide continuous habitat for species to move on their own, [and] are a reasonable and effective means for ensuring connectivity in the landscape.” I acknowledged that this book does not necessarily advocate for perfect, tidy corridor projects; rather, by being mindful of approaches informed by compassionate conservation, empathy, and TEK, we can conceptualize and implement corridor projects that engage more holistically with landscapes, wildlife, and people and better foster coexistence and connectivity.

An approach informed by compassionate conservation understands that the lives of all beings, human and nonhuman, matter in decisions about wildlife conservation and policy; moreover, when it comes to humans making decisions about the lives of nonhuman animals, a compassionate conservation approach would advocate for an approach to corridors that values all nonhuman animals—not just more well-known megafauna or keystone species; finally, it advocates that, whenever feasible, corridor and conservation projects employ solutions that proceed with as minimal disturbance to the natural landscape as possible. Ideas about empathy and TEK are implicitly aligned with such an approach and understand living beings, including humans, as needing to coexist with one another and with their environment. Entangled empathy similarly focuses on another's experiential well-being in the world and tends to be action-oriented and interested in what seems to be the best, or most compassionate choice, in helping to pursue or participate in another's well-being.