Engaging China: Beckett’s Debt to Pound, Giles, and Laloy

In her article "Engaging China: Beckett’s Debt to Pound, Giles, and Laloy," Lidan Lin examines Ezra Pound’s influence on Samuel Beckett. In their dealings with China, Pound and Beckett are both indebted to such sinologists and cultural transmitters as Ernest Fenollosa, H. A. Giles, Louis Laloy, and Laurence Binyon who introduced Chinese culture, literature, and arts to the Western world through translation and their writings about China. Lin situates the Pound-Beckett connection in the broad cultural context of the early 20th century. She argues that while modernism’s turn to China as a cultural paradigm was collectively brought about by writers, museum curators, and publishers, Beckett’s appropriation of China was part of this paradigm. In mapping this paradigm, she traces it to the 18th- and 19th-century phenomena of Chinoiserie and suggest their cultural and aesthetic continuity.