''Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment'' is a collection of previously uncollected writings by
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic expe ...
, spanning his entire career. The title is derived from the Latin phrase "disjecta membra," meaning scattered remains or fragments, usually applied to written work.
The essays appear in their original language of composition (English, French, or German), as stipulated by Beckett, since the volume is intended for scholars who should be able to read several languages. Beckett himself did not value these pieces much, seeing them as "mere products of friendly obligation or economic need".
The collection includes Beckett's famous essay on an early version of
James Joyce's ''
Finnegans Wake'' which originally appeared in ''
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress''.
Contents
* Foreword by Ruby Cohn
Part I: Essays at Esthetics
*
Dante...
Bruno.
Vico..
Joyce – ''essay on Finnegans Wake''
* Le Concentrisme – ''an account of an imaginary poet and the movement supposedly founded by him'' (French)
* Excerpts from
Dream of Fair to Middling Women
* German Letter of 1937 (German)
* Les Deux Besoins (French)
Part II: Words about Writers
* Other Writers
**
Mörike on
Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 17565 December 1791), baptised as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period (music), Classical period. Despite his short life, his ra ...
** Feuillerat on
Proust
** Leishmann's
Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), shortened to Rainer Maria Rilke (), was an Austrian poet and novelist. He has been acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, and is widely recogni ...
translation
**
Thomas McGreevy
Thomas McGreevy (July 29, 1825 – January 2, 1897) was a Canadian politician and contractor.
Born in Quebec, he was the son of Robert McGreevy, a blacksmith, and Rose Smith. In 1867 he was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Quebec West ...
** Recent
Irish poetry
Irish poetry is poetry written by poets from Ireland. It is mainly written in Irish language, Irish and English, though some is in Scottish Gaelic literature, Scottish Gaelic and some in Hiberno-Latin. The complex interplay between the two mai ...
**
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...
**
Papini on Dante
**
Seán O'Casey
** Censorship in the Street
**
Jack B. Yeats
Jack Butler Yeats RHA (29 August 1871 – 28 March 1957) was an Irish artist and Olympic medalist. W. B. Yeats was his brother.
Butler's early style was that of an illustrator; he only began to work regularly in oils in 1906. His early pict ...
**
Denis Devlin
Denis Devlin (15 April 1908 – 21 August 1959) was, along with Samuel Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy and Brian Coffey, one of the generation of Irish modernist poets to emerge at the end of the 1920s. He was also a career diplomat.
Early life and ...
** McGreevy on Jack B. Yeats
* Self
** The Possessed
** On
Murphy
Murphy () ( ga, Ua Murchadha) is an Irish surname and the most common surname in the Republic of Ireland.
Origins and variants
The surname is a variant of two Irish surnames: "Ó Murchadha"/"Ó Murchadh" (descendant of "Murchadh"), and "Mac ...
(to McGreevy)
** On Murphy (to Reavy)
** On Works to 1951
** On
Endgame
** On
Play
** On Murphy (to Sighle Kennedy)
** Program note for Endgame
Part III: Words about Painters
*
Geer van Velde
Gerardus "Geer" van Velde (5 April 1898, Lisse – 5 March 1977, Cachan, Paris) was a Dutch painter.
Biography
Early life
Van Velde was the second son of Willem Adriaan van Velde, then owner of a small case of inland waterway transport ...
* La Peinture des van Velde (French)
* Peintres de l'Empêchement (French)
*
Three Dialogues Originally published in ''transition'' 49 in 1949, ''Three Dialogues'' represents a small part (fewer than 3000 words) of a correspondence between Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit about the nature of contemporary art, with particular reference t ...
*
Henri Hayden
Henri Hayden, born Henryk Hayden (December 24, 1883 – May 12, 1970), was a Polish painter. Born in Warsaw, Hayden lived and worked in Paris. Hayden studied engineering at the Warsaw Polytechnic from 1902 to 1905, while simultaneously pursuing stu ...
Homme-Peintre (French)
* Hommage à Jack B. Yeats (French)
* Henri Heyden
*
Bram van Velde
Bram (Abraham Gerardus) van Velde (19 October 1895 – 28 December 1981) was a Dutch painter known for an intensely colored and geometric semi-representational painting style related to Tachisme, and Lyrical Abstraction. He is often seen as mem ...
* Pour
Avigdor Arikha
Avigdor Arikha ( he, אביגדור אריכא; April 28, 1929 – April 29, 2010) was a Romanian-born French–Israeli artist, printmaker and art historian.
Biography
Victor Długacz (later Avigdor Arikha) was born to German-speaking Jewish pare ...
(French)
Part IV: ''Human Wishes''
''A One-Act fragment from an early historical play.''
The play dramatized some episodes from the life of
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. The ''Oxford ...
and takes its title from his long poem ''
The Vanity of Human Wishes
''The Vanity of Human Wishes: The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated'' is a poem by the English author Samuel Johnson. It was written in late 1748 and published in 1749 (see 1749 in poetry). It was begun and completed while Johnson was busy writi ...
''. The episodes taken dramatize Johnson's relationship with
Hester Thrale, and as such, draw from her ''
Anecdotes
An anecdote is "a story with a point", such as to communicate an abstract idea about a person, place, or thing through the concrete details of a short narrative or to characterize by delineating a specific quirk or trait. Occasionally humorous, ...
'' and
Diaries rather than the traditionally more popular ''
Life of Samuel Johnson'' of
James Boswell
James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck (; 29 October 1740 (New Style, N.S.) – 19 May 1795), was a Scottish biographer, diarist, and lawyer, born in Edinburgh. He is best known for his biography of his friend and older contemporary the Englis ...
. The play was abandoned after the completion of the First Act.
The only known extant fragment was given by Beckett to
Ruby Cohn
Ruby Cohn (born Ruby Burman; August 13, 1922 – October 18, 2011) was an American theater scholar and a leading authority on playwright Samuel Beckett. She was a professor of Comparative Drama at the University of California, Davis for thir ...
. Beckett left it in her Paris Hotel room shortly before the completion of her book of Beckett criticism, ''Just Play'', the first to outline Beckett's dramatic
juvenilia
Juvenilia are literary, musical or artistic works produced by authors during their youth. Written juvenilia, if published at all, usually appears as a retrospective publication, some time after the author has become well known for later works.
...
. The fragment was first printed as an appendix to that volume. The fragment was slightly annotated for the Disjecta collection, noting that Beckett produced a "fair copy" of the notebook material. The fragment, however, is only one of the "three full notebooks" that Beckett used while writing the play.
Beckett would reuse some of the dramatic effects, however. Critic
Harold Bloom writes in his essay on Beckett in ''
The Western Canon'' that the fragment, particular the characters' reactions to Leavett's entrance offer the first glimpses of Beckett's much later masterpieces ''
Endgame'' and ''
Waiting for Godot''.
Notes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Disjecta (Beckett Essay)
Books by Samuel Beckett
Essay collections