Fail Better






"Fair Better": What It Means. Your Thoughts Wanted.


Possibly the most famous passage in all of Beckett outside of Waiting for Godot is this snippet from Worstward Ho: "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Let us note first off here that this quotation is often given in a truncated form, most typically "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." However, it is not clear that this makes self-contained syntactical sense without the two preceding sentences: "All of old. Nothing else ever."
What the statement means, not even philosophically but at a basic syntactic and semantic level, is open to interpretation. The intuition, correctly, is that it is possible to restate these clipped propositions less ambiguously, less impressionistically, without loss of meaning.
For example, Colin Greenlaw's "elaboration" reads as follows: "Everything is as it was of old. There's never been anything else. I've never tried anything else, never failed at anything else. But it doesn't matter: I'll try again, I'll fail again. I'll fail better than I did before."
Do you agree with this reading? In particular, it seems hard to accept that "Ever tried. Ever failed." stands for "I've never tried anything else, never failed at anything else." Does not the original seem to imply that things have indeed been tried, not 'untried'?
Then again, I think we must assume that the "ever" in "ever tried" and "ever failed" is meant to be, syntactico-semantically, the same "ever" as in the preceding sentence: "Nothing else ever." Which may suggest that Colin Greenlaw may have a point after all?
What do you think? How would you rephrase the quote best to clarify its meaning?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Irish Literature: What Makes Irish Writers So Good?

Image
James Joyce by Roger Cummiskey. When we think of Ireland, we think of a country that has a rich cultural heritage. A place which seems to be bursting at the seams with poets, novelists and playwrights, who all seem to have been gifted with an incredible innate sense of storytelling and drama. If you were to check the list of Nobel Prize winners since it’s inception, you’d find that Ireland ranks eighth in terms of how many it has produced over the years. Just what is it that makes the Irish so good at writing and the creative process? The first Irish foray into literature Culturally speaking, Ireland lays claim to the fact that it has one of the oldest forms of vernacular literature in the world, with only Greek or Latin able to match it. The Irish peoples were literate from the very earliest centuries, utilising a simple writing system called “Ogham” which was a way of communicating via inscriptions on little stone tablets. One of the very first proper written Irish wor...
Read more

Bloomsday - Spain 2017

Image
Click here Bloomsday 2017 edit Come and join us on the beach in Fuengirola on: Bloomsday, Friday 16 June 2017 at 08:00 h. We will start by reading Chapter six from Ulysses – Hades, Glasnevin cemetery in  YOUR language. Bring your own copy. Enquiries from +34 666 78 26 42.  And it is  FREE.  All that is required is that you   turn up on time   to participate. It will be a memorable occasion. A fun get together providing the opportunity to become fully or partially immersed in –  sea water. Bloomsday – June 16th  – is an annual celebration among Joyce fans throughout the world, from Fuengirola to Melbourne. It is celebrated in at least sixty countries worldwide. The novel,  Ulysses , by James Joyce recounts the hour-by-hour events of one day in Dublin – June 16, 1904 – as an ordinary Dubliner, Leopold Bloom, wends his way through the urban landscape, the odyssey of a modern-day Ulysses. Where:  The...
Read more

FRD Excursion to Malaga 2015

Image
Photos of the Excursion. Mr Bruce McEntyre - President of the Foundation of the English Cemetery and former British Consul, Malaga - Roger Cummiskey - President of the AIA Art Group. We visited he Sur Newspaper Offices and had a talk by Rachel Hynes, Editor and Liz Parry, Former Editor. We also saw the old printing press currently being taken apart. Following this we viewed a film entered for the Goya Awards entitled After this we were shown around the English Cemetery by Bruce McEntyre, President of the Cemetery Foundation and Liz Parry, Secretary. Mr Bruce McEntyre - President of the Foundation of the English Cemetery and former British Consul, Malaga. Roger Cummiskey - President of the AIA Art Group. Andalusian International Artists.  Translated from Spanish. The English Cemetery We also had a private viewing of the short film "La Cañada de los Ingleses" by Director Victor Matellano. The film was a prizewinning entry for the Goy...
Read more