Beckett’s Art of Mismaking

Beckett’s Art of Mismaking by Leland de la Durantaye.

This is a wonderful book. Highly recommend.

A few quotes from Introduction —

“It has become self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any more: not its relation to itself, not its relation to what is around it—not even its right to exist” (Adorno GS 7.9).

Another modern master, Ernest Hemingway, has a character respond to the question of how he went bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly” (Hemingway 2006, 141).

The first essay he published is on the most difficult work which our culture possesses—Finnegans Wake—and its central argument is that Finnegans Wake is not difficult.

Beckett’s last English novel, the wonderfully wearying Watt (1953)— a book so strange that when Beckett arrived in England in April 1945 the manuscript was confiscated on the suspicion that it might be a German code —

Whether called logo-clasm or word-storming, whether in poetry or prose, on page or stage, in German, French, or English, Beckett’s writing took stumbling, staggering, stunning aim at words —

A few more from BECKETTS ART OF MISMAKING Chapter 1:

With his hostility debased, and its creative possibilities neutralized, Beckett found himself with nothing to write to, from, for, or with but a “tired abstract anger” (LSB 1.55). It was difficult to stay and difficult to go, with all the while the lurking fear: “I’ll be here until I die, creeping along genteel roads on a stranger’s bike” (LSB 1.125).

In darker moments he seemed to anticipate, and apply to himself, the remark in Watt: “for all the good that frequent departures out of Ireland had done him, he might just as well have stayed there”(GC 1.374).

Not beating his fists on the table, not gushing, not being content with catlap, but crouching, brooding, and managing not to get drunk on the past are what Beckett hopes in these early years for his art.

Beckett has the Belacqua of this book declare: “If ever I do drop a book, which God forbid, trade being what it is, it will be a ramshackle, tumbledown, a bone-shaker, held together with bits of twine”

“To find a format that accommodates the mess.”

The core of Beckett’s first novel is what he calls “the incoherent continuum as expressed by, say, Rimbaud and Beethoven –

A defense attorney seeking to discredit Beckett asked him whether he was a Christian, a Jew, or an atheist, to which Beckett replied: “None of the three”

“Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell..”

MLA 9th Edition (Modern Language Assoc.) Leland de la Durantaye. Beckett’s Art of Mismaking. Harvard University Press, 2016.

APA 7th Edition (American Psychological Assoc.) Leland de la Durantaye. (2016). Beckett’s Art of Mismaking. Harvard University Press.

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