The Naïve Calculations of a Theorist

Beckett’s intermittent career as a theorist of art and literature begins with a warning: ‘The danger is in the neatness of identifications’ ( D 19). All the more dangerous for taking the form of a temptation, the identifications against which Beckett alerts readers of ‘Dante ... Bruno . Vico .. Joyce’ (1929) are not simply those that would unite two systems of thought or two writers—Joyce and Vico, for instance, or even Joyce and Dante—but, more generally, those between the philosophical and the literary enterprise, and indeed between thought and language as such. The positing not merely of analogical relations but of a ‘complete identification’, a perfect fit: this is for Beckett the great temptation, the one that ‘Giambattista Vico himself could not resist’ ( D 19).