''Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment'' (John Calder, 1983) is a collection of previously uncollected writings by
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and Tragicomedy, tra ...
, spanning his entire career. The title is derived from the Latin phrase "
disjecta membra
, also written , is Latin for "scattered fragments" (also scattered limbs, members, or remains) and is used to refer to surviving fragments of ancient poetry, manuscripts, and other literary or cultural objects, including even fragments of ancie ...
", 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
''Finnegans Wake'' is a novel by Irish literature, Irish writer James Joyce. It was published in instalments starting in 1924, under the title "fragments from ''Work in Progress''". The final title was only revealed when the book was publishe ...
'' which originally appeared in ''
''.
Contents
* Foreword by Ruby Cohn
Part I: Essays at Esthetics
*
Dante
Dante Alighieri (; most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri; – September 14, 1321), widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian Italian poetry, poet, writer, and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called ...
...
Bruno
Bruno may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Bruno (name), including lists of people and fictional characters with either the given name or surname
* Bruno, Duke of Saxony (died 880)
* Bruno the Great (925–965), Archbishop of Cologn ...
.
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 1756 – 5 December 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period (music), Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition and proficiency from an early age ...
** Feuillerat on
Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust ( ; ; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the novel (in French language, French – translated in English as ''Remembrance of Things Pas ...
** Leishmann's
Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet and novelist. Acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, he is widely recognized as a significant ...
translation
**
Thomas MacGreevy
Thomas MacGreevy (born Thomas McGreevy; 26 October 1893 – 16 March 1967) was a pivotal figure in the history of Irish literary modernism. A poet, he was also director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963 and served on the ...
** Recent
Irish poetry
**
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an List of poets from the United States, American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Ita ...
**
Papini on Dante
**
Seán O'Casey
Seán O'Casey ( ; born John Casey; 30 March 1880 – 18 September 1964) was an Irish dramatist and memoirist. A committed socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes.
Early life
O'Casey was ...
** Censorship in the Street
**
Jack B. Yeats
**
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 is an Irish surname meaning "Sea Warrior".
Origins and variants
The surname is a variant of two Irish surnames: "Ó Murchadha"/"Ó Murchadh" (descendant of "Murchadh"), and "Mac Murchaidh"/" Mac Murchadh" (son of "Murchadh") derived ...
(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
* La Peinture des van Velde (French)
* Peintres de l'Empêchement (French)
*
Three Dialogues
*
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 st ...
Homme-Peintre (French)
* Hommage à Jack B. Yeats (French)
* Henri Heyden
*
Bram van Velde
* Pour
Avigdor Arikha
Avigdor Arikha (; 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 parents in Rădăuţi, but grew ...
(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 ( – 13 December 1784), often called Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, sermonist, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. The ''Oxford ...
and takes its title from his long poem ''
The Vanity of Human Wishes
''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The ...
''. The episodes taken dramatize Johnson's relationship with
Hester Thrale
Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi (née Salusbury; 27 January 1741 or 16 January 1740 – 2 May 1821)Contemporary records, which used the Julian calendar and the Annunciation Style of enumerating years, recorded her birth as 16 January 1740. The pro ...
, 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.
Anecdotes may be real ...
'' and
Diaries Diaries may refer to:
* the plural of diary
A diary is a written or audiovisual memorable record, with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. Diaries have traditionally bee ...
rather than the traditionally more popular ''
Life of Samuel Johnson
''The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.'' (1791) by James Boswell is a biography of English writer and literary critic Samuel Johnson. The work was from the beginning a universal critical and popular success, and represents a landmark in the devel ...
'' of
James Boswell
James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck (; 29 October 1740 ( N.S.) – 19 May 1795), was a Scottish biographer, diarist, and lawyer, born in Edinburgh. He is best known for his biography of the English writer Samuel Johnson, '' Life of Samuel ...
. 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 thirt ...
. 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 appear as retrospective publications, some time after the author has become well known for later works. Bac ...
. 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
Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world". Af ...
writes in his essay on Beckett in ''
The Western Canon
''The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages'' is a 1994 book about Western literature by the American literary critic Harold Bloom, in which the author defends the concept of the Western canon by discussing 26 writers whom he sees as c ...
'' 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
''Waiting for Godot'' ( or ) is a 1953 play by Irish writer and playwright Samuel Beckett, in which the two main characters, Vladimir (Waiting for Godot), Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters w ...
''.
Notes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Disjecta (Beckett Essay)
Books by Samuel Beckett
Essay collections