A flight from meaning

Bersani and Dutoit write this:

In the modern period, various strategies have been adopted to reduce--ideally, to eliminate--this contamination of literature by the semantic promiscuity of its own materials: Mallarmé's radical reordering of syntax, Joyce's attempted reinvention of English in Finnegans Wake, and the modernist experiments (following the lead of Mallarmé's Un Coup de dés) with the visual representation of meaning in the page's design. These strategies are all intended to block or control the word's signifying power, to impede the otherwise inescapable production of meanings alien to this work of art.

Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment

A work of art trying to run away as far as possible from its inevitable meaning... this also is a very strange picture. Because in attempting to reduce meaning it is aiming at MEANING DIFFERENTLY than its original, "naturalistic" semanticity.

Interesting, but does it lead to anything interesting? If boredom is what they want, then I'd go for the Boredoms, rather. I mean, music is always there to avoid literal meanings.Why use language, in the first place?

On failure

It is interesting how Leo Bersani talks of Beckett's aesthetic of failure. For Bersani, Beckett "has yearned to fail more explicitly and more consistently than any other artists we know."

Here is the beginning of Bersani's essay on Beckett:

Perhaps the most serious reproach we can make against Samuel Beckett is that he has failed to fail. Failure is the ideal of nearly all Beckett's characters, and, in one of his rare theoretical statements, Beckett himself has said that "to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living."

Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment (1993)

But this quotation from Beckett is hard to grasp. It's from "Three Dialogues" in Disjecta. Let me spend some time pondering on it.