As the narrator comments of one character’s wedding speech, it is “rather too densely packed to gain the general suffrage”. Jammed with allusion, tricksy syntax and obscure vocabulary, its prose must be hacked through like a thorn bush. The collection, which follows Beckett’s mirror image Belacqua Shuah (SB/BS) around Dublin on a series of sexual misadventures, features moments of brilliance, is a challenging and frustrating read.
No one was willing to publish his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and the book of short stories he salvaged from it, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), sold disastrously. Fail better.”īeckett had already experienced plenty of artistic failure by the time he developed it into a poetics. I’ll go on” – and in the 1983 story Worstward Ho – “Ever tried. His best-known expressions of this philosophy appear at the end of his 1953 novel The Unnamable – “ … you must go on. The text reads: ‘What is my life but preference for the ginger biscuit?’ Photograph: Sotheby's/PAīeckett came to believe failure was an essential part of any artist’s work, even as it remained their responsibility to try to succeed.
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