The Art of Masks in Anne Carson and Samuel Beckett

An artist of analogy in all its disclosive incongruities, an inventor of unfamiliar masks, Anne Carson is above all a writer concerned with the many ways we are left broken, bereft, adrift, alone. These wounds are the source of her melancholic art. In this sense, as in others, there is a good measure of Samuel Beckett in Carson. Both write serial portraits of the artist as a melancholic; both are owl-like, intent on seeing what there is to see in the dark; both are preoccupied with falling and failing; both are deeply responsive to suffering and deeply aware of the rage that is a part of grief; both have a dry sense of humor; both are erudite, cerebral, irreverent, and fearlessly inventive. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” a threefold imperative on the first page of Beckett’s late Worstward Ho, is the epigraph to Carson’s Red Doc>. The thought connects these two artists of the wayward. Here I would like to approach Carson in the light of Beckett, concentrating on three concerns essential to the work of both: solitude, errancy, and the mask.