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

MJnr 2 (8) 2024, Presentations, Stanley E. Gontarski, The Anatomy of Joy
 
and those three overlapping fields of interest are shared between philoso­phers and artists, Beckett included. What Beckett seems to be suggesting is that he is not out to solve philosophical issues, nor to present them in philosophical language, but he does engage them, at least piecemeal. He presents them as felt. The mode is affect not reason. He offers images of absent solutions, of the crisis of ontology, say, the nature of being included, what it means to be – and some, Gabriel D’Aubarède, for instance, might consider those existential issues.
 
I will deal with roughly two issues in the following essay, although they tend to bleed into one another:
1) Fragments, or parts, or pieces – which may be a matter of aesthetics, or aesthetic theory – and their relationship to wholes, unities, totalities, and the like; and
2) Being, or ontology, coupled with epistemology, or how we know what we think we know.
 

The Part and the Whole

Can we approach and understand what appears to be only a piece of some-thing – a scrap of text, a portion of a body, a slice of a life – as somehow complete in itself, its own whole, say? One Beckett theater piece is called A Piece of Monologue(Beckett 1984a: 263–270), for instance, but they are all what we call pieces of art. What are the implications if art can only ever be a piece of something or someone, a fragment – that is, the whole, of a story, of a life, say, would take a lifetime to pre­sent, and that life could never be complete, whole, say, until it ended. Until then life, and so art, since art has no other subject, is an unstable, elusive entity, a work in progress. If we posit that the necessary condition of art is the fragment or that art itself can only be achieved, perceived or witnessed as fragmented, an entity with missing parts, perhaps, and so includes or is based on an absence, it offers, thereby, the presence of absence – or art as making absence present – most often through an image. This is especially the case with theater during which we witness a pre­sentation, the presentness of absence, since art entails the condition of incomple-tion rather than completion; a completion, on the other hand, tends to arrest or stop, to shut down possibilities. A brash, youthful Samuel Beckett put the matter thus: “[…] art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear, does not make clear […]” (Beckett 1984b: 94) or “whole,” we might add.

But if art is a fragment or a piece, what precisely might it be a fragment or piece of? In the chapter Art, a Fragment from The Sense of the World, the late French

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