{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03134418324291742, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.792321116928447, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Art of Failure

For Samuel Beckett the success or failure of art depends on its relation to the individual self. But the instant we start talking of success when approaching Beckett we encounter a distinctly idiosyncratic problem, for Beckett’s entire aesthetic is founded on ‘an art of failure’. Failure for Beckett is the only artistic goal, the single act of expression it is worth trying to articulate: ‘to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion’. This terse statement illustrates the writer’s precarious condition, for if words can only express their own failure to express then the quest for selfknowledge is unlikely to succeed. It is hard enough trying to communicate the myriad perceptions of the external world, but any attempt on the part of the artist to speak directly of the workings of the mind and the inner sensations gleaned through introspection becomes impossible. The writer must rely on wholly metaphorical language mediated by subjectivity and the mind’s conscious modelling or re-modelling of linguistic limitations. But the compulsion to express is strong and irresistible: ‘Live and invent. I have tried. I must have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is live. No matter. I have tried.’ So says Malone, phrasing his compulsion in terms of creation while recognising the futility of the task. Beckett’s heroes, most notably those of the trilogy, know what it is to fail; indeed, they know nothing else. Molloy, for instance, is subject to the obligation to write but cannot explain why. Writing is an unwelcome chore to be ‘dashed off with loathing’. Rather than perform the meaningless task of writing, he would prefer to ‘obliterate’ all words, leaving only a black void staring menacingly back at the reader: ‘you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery’. Obliterating texts, blackening margins, darkening the page, obscuring the written word in perpetuum just as speech obfuscates thought—these are the ways in which Beckett seeks to express the misery of being human, and they comprise a central aspect of his legacy to Derek Mahon. ‘The Attic’ returns us to a setting familiar in Mahon’s work, the lonely garret, where the image of ‘dockyard fluorescence’ implies a contemplation of Belfast. He equates this fluorescence with an inspirational ‘Muse-light’ which irradiates both the city and the poet’s punningly described ‘world of heightened sense’. Mahon initially seems to find consolation in his lonely activities as he addresses John and Evelyn Montague, whose attic he is occupying and to whom the poem is dedicated, with the words, ‘Listen, can you hear me / Turning over a new leaf?’, but this only serves as a prelude to the speaker’s increasing sense of isolation. The address proves to be nothing more than a brief interruption to the inexorable flow of time—figured by the ‘ticking lamplight’—and the inevitable shift from night to day. Time is meaningless in this world, the ‘patient surfaces’ of the speaker’s environment bearing testimony to his insignificance. His quest, first to re-shape his identity