“He will now think he hears her”: Indirect Perception and the Return to Proust in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio

Abstract: Although the protagonist “F” of Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio (1976) relies equally on musical and non-musical listening while awaiting a mysterious female visitor, only his immersion in Beethoven’s music has been deemed critically significant. In what is the first sustained account of the intra- and extra-diegetic importance of non-musical listening in Ghost Trio , I stage a mutually illuminating encounter between the teleplay and Proust , Beckett’s 1931 study of À la recherche du temps perdu . F’s ambient listening, with its distinctive inferential mechanics, emerges as Beckett’s intertextual return to the Proustian motif of “indirect” perception that had engaged him as a young critic. My reading of Ghost Trio conversely re-appraises Beckett’s critical engagement with the Recherche ’s soundscape. I foreground his many allusions to non-musical listening across Proust and his marginal annotations in the novel—still a largely untapped resource in this regard—while establishing their relevance to a phase of Beckett’s oeuvre where Proust’s influence is believed to have dissipated.