Beckett’s cachet among literary scholars has also become a truly global phenomenon: from the first generation of critics such as Ruby Cohn, Laurence Harvey, and Herbert Blau (director of the legendary 1957 San Quentin prison production of Waiting for Godot), Beckett scholarship flourishes in Argentina, Nigeria, Japan, Poland, India, and just about everywhere else. Beckett’s manuscripts and theatrical notes assumed a singularly iconic role in scholarship from the beginning (see Ruby Cohn on the early abandoned play, Human Wishes), and more recent depositions of early creative drafts and autodidactic notes in university libraries have prompted debates over the utility and purpose of academic work on the so-called ‘grey canon’.

Thus the arrival of ‘new’ prose fiction – Faber’s elegant volume of Echo’s Bones, edited by the director of the International Beckett Foundation at the University of Reading, Mark Nixon – is an event charged with specific resonances. What does it tell us of Beckett’s attempt to make his way out from under James Joyce’s long shadow? How does it alter the critical reception of More Pricks Than Kicks, the prose collection published in 1934 to which it was to be added, or for that matter, of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, the novel Beckett abandoned and later mined for the material in More Pricks, and only published posthumously in 1992?

Echo’s Bones relates the afterlife of Belacqua Shuah following his off-stage death in ‘Yellow’, the penultimate story in More Pricks: this story sequence documents Belacqua’s erotic, social, and intellectual travails and his eventual tragicomic death. The character is a kind of revenant of the indolent Florentine lutist upon whom Dante and Virgil happen in Ante-Purgatory in Canto IV of the Inferno; he also bears more than a passing resemblance to his author as a student at Trinity College Dublin.

Echo’s Bones divides into three parts: upon Belacqua’s spectral resuscitation (‘The dead die hard’, as the opening phrase has it), he is met by one Zaborovna Privet, who emerges from a hedge, as per her surname (zabor is Russian for fence and zabornaja literatura is ‘literature of the fence’ or pornography), and with whom he repairs to her lodgings for a repast of garlic and white rum; he is then assaulted by Lord Haemo Gall of Wormwood, who demands that Belacqua solve the issue of his endangered entailment by siring a child with Lady Wormwood (‘Moll,’ a proleptic vision of Sucky Moll, who will appear with her single crucifix tooth in Malone Dies); and finally, Belacqua finds himself sitting upon his tombstone in a ‘classico-romantic scene’ (Beckett hedging his own bets?), where he meets Mick Doyle, the erstwhile unnamed groundsman from ‘Draff’, the final story in More Pricks Than Kicks. They wager on what Doyle might find in Belacqua’s coffin – nothing but a handful of stones, just as Ovid has it for Echo in his Metamorphoses, and the aroma of potatoes. These picaresque tableaux offer a pretext for Beckett’s emulation of James Joyce’s stylistic pyrotechnics – the funambulistic punning, highly freighted allusions (equally hieratic and demotic) – evidence of which is assiduously documented in Mark Nixon’s annotations, which extend longer than the story itself. The notes aim for, and largely achieve, concision over repletion, but the allusive density of the narrative ensures that there are plentiful discoveries to await the careful reader.

The story – excised, abandoned, salvaged – tells us a good deal about Beckett’s composition methods, specifically his habits of creative recycling. Letters to Beckett from his publisher, Charles Prentice (several of which are helpfully included in the present volume), indicate that the story was commissioned to bulk up the ten existing stories in the draft of More Pricks Than Kicks in the hope of producing a more saleable volume. Once Prentice had decided against the inclusion of the lengthy finale, the typescript was laid aside until eventually coming into the possession of Lawrence Harvey, who then bequeathed it to Dartmouth College (a carbon copy of the manuscript was purchased by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 1991, complementing its formidable Beckett collection).

The hallucinatory narrative of Belacqua’s vestigial afterlife – in ‘Draff’, his body is a ‘hyphen of reality’ – ultimately proved too risky for Prentice. But Beckett sedimented parts of the text back into More Pricks, and reserved a number of little gems for later works, such as the Trinity College ‘Madden prizeman’ in the Addenda to his wartime novel Watt, published in 1953 (there to transform into ‘the maddened prizeman’), or the ‘strangury’ that was to become Vladimir’s offstage affliction in Godot, and then to reappear in the late prose work Ill Seen Ill Said in 1982.

Other, more abstruse jokes abide in the text: Belacqua’s early spirit-procession includes the figure of a journalist–editor, complete with ‘po hat’. In Watt, the novel’s eponymous anti-hero learns from his travelling companion, Dum Spiro (‘While I breathe, I hope’), that one can rearrange the letters of the Holy Family to produce the question and answer: ‘Has J. Jurms a po? Yes.’ J. Jurms, Jerms Choice, James Joyce – Beckett alludes to his early mentor and formidable influence most obliquely, in the headwear of the editor ‘of a Monthly masquerading as a Quarterly’, perhaps a distant cousin to Joyce’s own newspaperman, Leopold Bloom. These and other negotiations of literary patrimony are recycled in deceptive ways. When Belacqua reflects that ‘No gardener has died, within rosaceous memory,’ he recalls Bernard le Bovier de Fontanelle by way of Denis Diderot’s Le Rêve de d’Alembert (1830). This item of French intellectual history (or ‘ephemeral sophism’, as Beckett’s ‘Dream Notebook’ has it) is recycled into the final lines of ‘Draff’. But it goes on to experience the briefest vestigial afterlife in the addenda to Watt, where that novel’s anti-hero realises his status as an ‘old rose’, ‘indifferent to the gardener’.

Beckett’s literary work crosses many genres and invents one or two of its own over his long career. The evidence for his aesthetic development – from Joycean plenitude and translinguistic punning of his earlier works, towards the austere discipline of literary ‘decreation’ of the later works – becomes clear when the entire oeuvre is laid out before the reader. But in a special sense, the genetic code for this dialectical process of plenitude and asceticism is contained within each text. This edition of Echo’s Bones provides, at last, public recognition of the crucial role this minor text plays in the development of Beckett’s aesthetics and his composition strategies. As the narrator says of Doyle, ‘We don’t forget him, all poor people we don’t forget them’, and so it goes with this little prose stone.