Beckett's Art of Mismaking by Leland de la Durantaye (review)

Leland de la Durantaye's Beckett's Art of Mismaking introduces its unique idiom from the very start. Eschewing jargon and resisting the potential obfuscations of philosophical or critical discourse, Durantaye calls it like it is: "The aim of art has been fine making. And then along came an Irishman named Samuel Beckett who ended the whole thing, closed the proceedings, put art to rest, at last, for it was very tired" (2). Both familiar and tantalizingly simple, such a premise speaks for the project in its entirety.

The writer's engaging, witty, and accessible style is strategic. As he will comment later on: "In the last sixty years Beckett has been the subject of a variety, intensity, and quality of critical writing without modern parallel.…What then is the result of all this indisputably excellent writing for a shared understanding of Beckett's mismade art? The answer is almost nothing" (106). Reflecting on the futility of our critical endeavor, Durantaye suggests that "[t]he symbolic surface of Beckett's mature writing is so smooth, its details so vaguened, its form so deformed, and its art so mismade, that no symbolic significance encounters enough friction to come to rest there, and so off everything attracted goes, back into the space of speculation" (107). Readers in search of conceptual anchors, theoretical paradigms, and philosophical analogues will not find them here. Instead, Durantaye offers a journey through Beckett's life and works that is both celebratory and informative. The book enlists a mixture of plot synopses, biographical anecdotes, letters, criticism, popular culture, philosophy, and a wide array of citations from unfinished scraps to the canonical works. Beckett is everywhere in this study—and the well-versed and uninitiated readers alike will conclude their reading of this book with a desire to go back to the author. To make us want to reread Beckett—this is true praise for any work of criticism.

The study is divided into six chapters, each of which is loosely organized around commonplaces of Beckett scholarship. The will, nature, language, symbolism, the series, and aesthetic pessimism all serve, in turn, as prompts for a consideration of what a mismade art might be, how it might be created, and, later, how it might be understood.

The introduction opens with an anecdotal history of the striking differences between an art that was (Michelangelo selecting marble in Carrara) and one that is (Marcel Duchamp purchasing a urinal in a New York shop), from a conceptualization of a finely made artistic object to one that is artistically unmade. The following two chapters progress metonymically from the rejection of omniscient narration to, inter alia, the question of faith, God, man, isolation, fellowship, and storytelling. Insights along the way touch on an array of discourses—translation, art, narratology, philosophy, and history. The language is playful, performative, funny, and intensely communicative. In place of the critical practice of conceptual substitution, Durantaye maintains Beckett's idiom and traces its variations in multiple works. His analysis thus emerges as a concordance of sorts for the author's many linguistic and aphoristic topoi. Secondary sources are sampled in passing but the voice of authority is Beckett's. No conclusion or argument is provided to explain away the peculiarities of his turn of phrase. We are encouraged to experience rather than decipher its slippages.

Chapter three follows the writer's first steps in the art of mismaking by attending to his manipulations of the natural order. A path is traced from Beckett's thoughts on painting through the question of the symbol to the familiar ground of nonrelation. Chapter four addresses Beckett's decision to write in French before turning to the broader question of language. Beckett's self-proclaimed distinction from Joyce is here cited in order to distinguish a language that invigorates and creates from one that mismakes. The latter neither embraces life nor communicates experience.

Chapter five charts a chronological history of the disappearance of the world from Beckett's...