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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2025
Abstract
Dante, and particularly the Commedia, best represents the ubiquity of Italy in Beckett's oeuvre, providing an intellectual scaffolding and a suite of structuring images in texts ranging from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Worstward Ho. Italian words and literary allusions also arise at significant points in Beckett's texts, such as ‘lick chops and basta’ at the end of Ill Seen Ill Said, or the cluster of references to Giacomo Leopardi in the Watt manuscript notebooks. One significant Italian allusion is that of the Pantheon in Rome in All Strange Away as an architectural model for the confined space in which the two bodies are observed by the narrator. It is not the only reference to Roman or Italian architecture in Beckett's work – the Villa Doria Pamphili is mentioned in the Watt notebooks, and the Basilica di San Marco in Venice appears briefly in Dream. However, the Pantheon holds a special place in Beckett's architectural vision, not merely due to its exemplary design but as a focal point for Beckett's enduring preoccupation with modes of interment. The figures in All Strange Away are entombed in their suffocating space, which is likened to the ‘beehive tombs’ or Bronze Age tholoi of Greece and Western Asia, and which also recall the medieval monastic clocháns of southwestern Ireland. The Pantheon is situated between these epochal designations and connects them, casting its singular formal perfections across a history of burial, entombment and memorialization. That this particular building is tied so closely to memory and imagination – and their potential extinctions – bestows it with its own memorial function. It becomes an allusion marking a site of remembrance from which careful excavation will exhume textual relics from the living soil into the life-giving air. This essay will explore how the Pantheon, including its history and structure, anchors this terrain across Beckett's work. It will weigh up how Beckett's architecture of interment pivots on sacred places and their proneness to profanation, and how these sites constitute memorial markers that enable loss to dim into forgetting.
Keywords: Pantheon; architecture; tomb; tumulus; dome; masonry; stone
Italy and Italian culture provide some of the most prominent guides to the thematic and aesthetic formations in Beckett's work.
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