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Purgatory Regained? Dante and Late Beckett

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Dante’s Modern Afterlife

Abstract

‘One loses one’s classics’, Winnie reflects in Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), though she characteristically qualifies this with ‘not all’ and the affirmation ‘a part remains, of one’s classics, to help one through the day’.1 Among the smatterings of shattered classics that she quotes, Winnie makes a reference to ‘the sweet old style’, unmistakably alluding in Beckett’s newer, sourer style, to Dante’s dolce stil novo.2 Of all ‘the classics , Dante is the one most alive in the shadowy modern afterworld in which Beckett’s characters live.3 In Beckett’s work Dante’s ‘sweet new style’ has become the ‘old style’ against which Beckett’s speakers unconsciously and consciously model themselves.

Dante and the Logos and all strata and mysteries Samuel Beckett, Echo’s Bones

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Authors
  1. Hugh Haughton
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, United Kingdom

    Nick Havely (Senior Lecturer) (Senior Lecturer)

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© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Haughton, H. (1998). Purgatory Regained? Dante and Late Beckett . In: Havely, N. (eds) Dante’s Modern Afterlife. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26975-4_10

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