On Fragments: A Piece of Art and the “I” – or Not

Prelude

On 16 February 1961 Samuel Beckett was interviewed by French novelist and critic Gabriel D’Aubarède. The exchange went as follows:

Gabriel D’Aubarède: “Have contemporary philosophers had any influence on your thought?”
Samuel Beckett: “I never read philosophers.”
GD: “Why not?”
SB: “I never understand anything they write.”
GD: “All the same, people have wondered if the existentialists’ problem of being may afford a key to your works.”
SB: “There’s no key or problem. I wouldn’t have had any reason to write my novels [or plays, we might add]1 if I could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms.”
GD: “What was your reason then?”
SB: “I haven’t the slightest idea. I’m no intellectual. All I am is feeling. Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel.”

(Graver and Federman 1979: 219)

What Beckett is resisting in this exchange seems to be the quest for totality, unity, wholeness or foundations, the historical concerns of philosophy. He is not dismissing philosophical issues, or thought in general, however. Art exists at the intersection of emotion and thought, and Beckett’s leanings tend toward the former – with­out, however, dismissing the latter. He is, after all, as he insists, an artist, but not without intellectual interests, and even those of philosophy. Certainly, his concerns have dealt with aesthetics, epistemology and ontology, three of the five fields of philosophy (I’m leaving out, for now, philosophy’s other traditional fields of logic and ethics)

[1] All comments within quotations enclosed in square brackets are mine, SG.