Beckett’s Art of Mismaking

In this lean study, de la Durantaye (Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction), an English professor at Claremont McKenna College, combines exegesis, biography, and deeply informed critical theorizing to speculate on the meaning and methodology of Samuel Beckett’s famously demanding oeuvre. De la Durantaye’s central thesis is that Beckett’s “logoclasm,” or “ruptured writing,” dismantled the traditional aims of literature in order to uncover what, if anything, lay beneath the language. In dense but artful chapters, de la Durantaye explores how and why this logoclasm manifested in Beckett’s preoccupation with landscapes that evoke estrangement, his Oedipal flight from friend and mentor James Joyce’s style, and the psychopathology of his “gallery of moribunds.” In interpreting Beckett’s aesthetic pessimism in terms of these categories of “willed creative mismaking,” de la Durantaye goes some way toward distinguishing his book from the wealth of available studies on the modernist master. This brief but substantial contribution finds Beckett at “a crossroads of artifice” in which an exhausted literature seeks to understand itself by disappearing into the “thenceless thitherless there” of abstraction and silence. [em](Jan.) [/em]