Samuel Beckett’s debut novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women is ‘a patchwork of quotations, allusions and meta-fiction’. Its allusions to early Chinese music are mostly re-tellings of parts of Louis Laloy’s La musique chinoise, which in turn are largely based upon Chinese source texts. Of them, the legend of ‘Líng Lún Inventing Pitch Pipes’ is ultimately the re-telling of a section of the ancient Chinese encyclopedia Master Lǚ’s Historical Records. In the contrastive study of Beckett’s re-telling, Laloy’s version and Chinese source texts, three questions ignored in extant Western scholarship on Beckett are discovered and answered. Relevant re-telling and misreading reflect how the mythic birth of Chinese chromaticism was received in Western Europe in the early twentieth century. And Beckett’s forsaking of Chinese culture after Murphy results from his minimalism.
Cao et al. (Sat,) studied this question.