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Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment

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The hard to find piece "Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce" is included in this collection, and for this piece only, this is valuable for all Beckett enthusiasts. "Dante" was the leadoff essay to a collection of essays by James Joyce's peers on "Work in Progress," which later became "Finnegans Wake." Beckett's insight into the works of Dante, Vico and Joyce is scary (I'm not sure that Beckett cared too much about Bruno). These three figures have come to be important influences in Beckett's writings, and the fusion of Dante and Joyce reveals the very core of Beckett's own oeuvre. (This is the piece where Beckett defiantly stated: "Here form is content, content is form." Also, the line: "Literary criticism is not book-keeping.") In any case, Beckett the great prose-stylist, a healthy rival to Joyce, demonstrates his worth as a critic, perhaps the best critic of Joyce. Also, included in this book is the "Three Dialogues" with Georges Duthuit. This is the classic pseudo-interview that reveals some of Beckett's greatests remarks on art:

"Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road."

"The stars are undoubtedly superb, as Freud remarked on reading Kant's cosmological proof of the existence of God."

"All that should concern us is the acute and increasing anxiety of the relation itself, as though shadowed more and more darkly by a sense of invalidity, of inadequacy, of existence at the expense of all that it excludes, all that it blinds to."

Superb. It's hard to imagine giving good word to Beckett. It is better to let these words trickle, slide, and coagulate on their own. As Beckett quoted from Freud, "The stars are undoubtedly superb..."

Beckett at 22. Who could write that essay at 22, but Beckett? In fairness, most of the ideas are from Joyce's mouth to Beckett's pen: but it is Beckett's pen, not Joyce's mouth that interests us. Lines scarely better than those in Beckett's "Proust".

The danger, after all, is in the neatness of identifications.

This is not much of a book. It is a collection of scraps of writing done by Beckett. There are Essays on Aesthetics,Words about Writers, Words about Painters.Beckett writes about Joyce, Proust, Sean O'Casey and Irish poets like Denis Devlin, and Thomas McGreevy. The language is extremely difficult and Beckett often uses words I doubt most readers will know. Some of the essays are in French, and Beckett would not allow them to be translated. There is little to my mind which signals the great Beckett narratives which are the heart of his work. The editor of this book had Beckett's permission to bring together these pieces but it seems to me they will add nothing to Beckett's reputation.