Becketts Art of Mismaking

Readers have long responded to Samuel Becketts novels and plays with wonder or bafflement. They portray blind, lame, maimed creatures cracking whips and wielding can openers who are funny when they should be chilling, cruel when they should be tender, warm when most wounded. His works seem less to conclude than to stop dead. And so readers quite naturally ask: what might all this be meant to mean? In a lively and enlivening study of a singular creative nature, Leland de la Durantaye helps us better understand Becketts strangeness and the notorious difficulties it presents. He argues that Becketts lifelong campaign was to mismake on purposenot to denigrate himself, or his audience, nor even to reconnect with the child or the savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future. Whether called creative willed mismaking, logoclasm, or word-storming in the name of beauty, Beckett meant by these terms an art that attacks language and reason, unity and continuity, art and life, with wit and venom. Becketts Art of Mismaking explains Becketts views on language, the relation between work and world, and the interactions between stage and page, as well as the motives guiding his sixty-year-long careerhis strange decision to adopt French as his literary language, swerve from the complex novels to the minimalist plays, determination to fail better, and principled refusal to follow any easy path to originality.