On Fragments: A Piece of Art and the “I” – or Not
kind, and he seemed perplexed by what he considered perpetual misunderstand-ing of his work in terms of implications beyond itself. In a letter to Pamela Mitchell of 18 August 1955 (Beckett 2011: 540), Beckett notes, “I am really very tired of Godotand the endless misunderstanding it seems to provoke. How anything so skeleton simple can be complicated as it has been is beyond me” (Beckett 2011: 540). Beck-ett liked the remark well enough to repeat it to Mary Manning Howe that same day, on 18 August, which letter does not appear in The Collected Letters. He would punctuate this view to D’Aubarède in 1961: “There’s no key or problem.” Or, rather, what Beckett was suggesting, as he often had, is that what problem exists, may be of our own making, and much of that is trying to link his work to what Hegel called “aesthetic religion” or to some sort of transcendental truth external to the work. If we then suspend our need for transcendence, for solutions, for presence, for a com-pleteness or totality, and its accompanying failures, what remains? – perhaps only an incompleteness, and so an ungrounding as we are left with the fact that all thought (that is, philosophy itself), all art is fragment. What is left, however, remains an event, a presentation, an experience. This thread may lead us to issue #2, ontol-ogy, or being, or particularly selfconsciousness, the experience of the self, which is central to what we might call the Modern or contemporary encounter with art.
Let us look at some further manifestations of this thread.
French philosopher Roland Barthes connects “the pleasure of the text,” or what he calls “a jouissance of meaning” (Kristeva 2000: 188), less with a linear reading for plot than with a concern for history (against accusations of being a mere structural-ist who treats language in isolation), and he sees writing, what he calls écriture, “as a negativity, a movement that questions all ‘identity’ (whether linguistic, corporeal, or historical)” (Kristeva 2000: 193). This entails reading more like a writer than a tra-ditional reader who may not take an active role in meaning creation. This thread resonated with Julia Kristeva’s thinking, her interest in meaning production as a combined effort between affects and drives on one side (which she calls the semi-otic) and the larger system of symbolic law on the other (society, history), Hegel’s “aesthetic religion.” All being and its thoughts are thus fragments. Being, the I, say, or its “me,” is divided at least, more likely multiple, so fragmented, and so can be accurately presented or represented only as a fragment. As Rodolphe Gasché puts it in his essaylength Foreword to Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophical Fragments (Univer-sity of Minnesota, 1991), and Schlegel has as much impact on literary criticism as he did on philosophy:
Whether the very concept of the fragment, as well as its history, is indeed suf-ficient to describe the form of the more significant literary experiments from the late nineteenth century up to the present, as well as to conceptualize the intrinsic difference(s), heterogeneity, plurality, and so forth, of the text, has to