'Thought is Wisdom in a Dream' - Dream of Fair to Middling Women
The scope of these footnotes to Beckett's volume is best grasped by a glance at this article's actual footnotes. "I continue to trace the literary and historical allusions in the text..." - and they extend (with points between) from Plato's Dialogues, to The Romance Of The Rose, to St. John Of The Cross and St. Teresa Of Avila, to James Stephens, to Jean-Paul Sartre.
The author's final observations sum up her project : "I have tried to show how Beckett, in his efforts to write `the right' story, has drawn on the greatest writers of literature and of the Church, incorporating from them what might be useful to his work. George Saintsbury once wrote that :"The charge of plagiarism is usually an excessively idle one; for when a man of genius steals, he always makes the theft his own; and when a man steals without genius, the thefts are merely fairy gold which turns to leaves and pebbles under his hand"...There is much wisdom and folly in the book, and much `silent music' which is part of The Dark Night. Beckett...did indeed `steal' but in such a way that the thefts have gone largely unnoticed for close on forty years".
Mary Lynch is engaged in research on th eworks of Samuel Beckett.
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