{"id":4452,"date":"2024-09-02T22:34:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-02T20:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fabrica.us.edu.pl\/?p=4452"},"modified":"2026-01-11T19:44:26","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T18:44:26","slug":"on-fragments-a-piece-of-art-and-the-i-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fabrica.us.edu.pl\/?p=4452&lang=en","title":{"rendered":"On Fragments: A Piece of Art and the \u201cI\u201d \u2013 or Not"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Stanley E. Gontarski<\/a><\/h2>\n

(Florida State University United States)
E-mail: sgontarski[at]fsu.edu
ORCID<\/a>: 0000-0002-2899-4209
DOI<\/a>: 10.31261\/FLPI.2024.08.10
\u201eFabrica Litterarum Polono-Italica\u201d 2024, nr 2(8).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Download the article\u0142<\/strong><\/a>
Download all issue<\/a><\/strong>
Abstract in\u00a0Polish<\/a>,\u00a0Italian<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

With much confidence and tranquility, Whitman states that <\/em>
writing is fragmentary, and that the American writer has to<\/em>
devote himself to writing in fragments. […] America brings <\/em>
together extracts, it presents samples from all ages, all <\/em>
lands, all nations.<\/em><\/p>\n

Gilles Deleuze<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Prelude<\/h2>\n

On 16 February 1961 Samuel Beckett was interviewed by French novelist and critic Gabriel D\u2019Aubar\u00e8de. The exchange went as follows:<\/p>\n

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Gabriel D\u2019Aubar\u00e8de: \u201cHave contemporary philosophers had any influence on your thought?\u201d
Samuel Beckett: \u201cI never read philosophers.\u201d
GD: \u201cWhy not?\u201d
SB: \u201cI never understand anything they write.\u201d
GD: \u201cAll the same, people have wondered if the existentialists\u2019 problem of being may afford a key to your works.\u201d
SB: \u201cThere\u2019s no key or problem. I wouldn\u2019t have had any reason to write my novels [or plays, we might add]1 if I could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms.\u201d
GD: \u201cWhat was your reason then?\u201d
SB: \u201cI haven\u2019t the slightest idea. I\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Graver and Federman 1979: 219)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019s leanings tend toward the former \u2013 with\u00adout, 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\u2019m leaving out, for now, philosophy\u2019s other traditional fields of logic and ethics)<\/p>\n

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[1] All comments within quotations enclosed in square brackets are mine, SG.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

<\/div>\n
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and those three overlapping fields of interest are shared between philoso\u00adphers 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 \u2013 and some, Gabriel D\u2019Aubar\u00e8de, for instance, might consider those existential issues.<\/div>\n
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I will deal with roughly two issues in the following essay, although they tend to bleed into one another:<\/div>\n
1) Fragments, or parts, or pieces \u2013 which may be a matter of aesthetics, or aesthetic theory \u2013 and their relationship to wholes, unities, totalities, and the like; and<\/div>\n
2) Being, or ontology, coupled with epistemology, or how we know what we think we know.<\/div>\n
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The Part and the Whole<\/h2>\n

Can we approach and understand what appears to be only a piece of some-thing \u2013 a scrap of text, a portion of a body, a slice of a life \u2013 as somehow complete in itself, its own whole, say? One Beckett theater piece is called A Piece of Monologue(Beckett 1984a: 263\u2013270), 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 \u2013 that is, the whole, of a story, of a life, say, would take a lifetime to pre\u00adsent, 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 \u2013 or art as making absence present \u2013 most often through an image. This is especially the case with theater during which we witness a pre\u00adsentation, 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: \u201c[…] art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear, does not make clear […]\u201d (Beckett 1984b: 94) or \u201cwhole,\u201d we might add.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, the late French<\/p>\n

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philosopher Jean\u00adLuc Nancy (1940\u20132021) opens that question of art\u2019s presentness, its \u201cpresentification,\u201d in the awkward terminology of the German Romantics, or the concept of \u201cliveness\u201d in contemporary theater theory, and its relation to a broader totality, the notion that it fits comfortably into some broader biographical, political, theological, or philosophical system. \u201cIn short, this is Hegel\u2019s thesis on the aesthe\u00adtic religion of ancient Athens: the notion that particular art forms (notably tragedy and statuary in the Hellenic world) must be understood in the context of their roles in establishing and maintaining a civic religion,\u201d but our contemporary culture has witnessed a breakdown of such metaphysical concerns and social systems as such generally unifying systems vanish. As critic John McKeane puts it, citing Nancy from The Sense of the World<\/em>:<\/div>\n
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\u201cHegel delivers art for itself: he delivers it from service to transcendence in immanence, and he delivers it to detached, fragmentary truth. Hegel […] regis-ters and salutes in fact the birth of art.\u201d […] But in freeing, liberating, or deliver-ing art from this role, Hegel is thought by Nancy to be enacting the deliveranceof art. We can understand this term as a liberation, but also as a delivery lack-ing any given end or destination, a destiny that is also an errancy […]. Its con-nection to a broader totality of aesthetic religion having been severed, and it therefore having become a fragment, art is not stripped of its role, but instead [is] set free, or indeed\u2014like a baby\u2014delivered. (McKeane 2023: 266).<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
So one question we can ask of art is what is the relationship between the piece, the fragment to the whole? That connection may be part of the traditional process of constructing meaning and understanding. But we now might ask, which whole \u2013 that may be what is at issue. The whole body? The whole landscape, much of which we cannot see? The world? The universe? But art does not explain and as such even verbal art is similar to painting in that it presents an image or images but without what Beckett calls \u201cclarity,\u201d without explanation or discourse from even its creator, because art always comprises or constitutes a gap, an absence. \u201cNotice,\u201d Nancy tells us, \u201cthat by drawing sense out of absence, by making absense [absence] a presense[presence], the image does not do away with the impalpable nature of absence.\u201d And so, for Nancy, attempts at a solidification of identity (or presence), say, are an intrusion and so constitute an act of violence: \u201cThe unity of the thing [the artwork, say], of presence and of the subject, is itself violent\u201d (Nancy 2005: 2). Art then has nothing to reveal, a point that Samuel Beckett has been making at least since the breakthrough success of Waiting for Godot. As he told Gabriel D\u2019Aubar\u00e8de in 1961, \u201cThere\u2019s no key or problem.\u201d In his plays, Beckett seems consistently to have urged us to take his characters and their situations at face value and this in isolation, unre-lated to larger systems that Hegel called \u201caesthetic religion,\u201d or to systems of any<\/div>\n
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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, \u201cI 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\u201d (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\u2019Aubar\u00e8de in 1961: \u201cThere\u2019s no key or problem.\u201d 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 \u201caesthetic religion\u201d 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? \u2013 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 self\u00adconsciousness, the experience of the self, which is central to what we might call the Modern or contemporary encounter with art.<\/div>\n
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Let us look at some further manifestations of this thread.<\/div>\n
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French philosopher Roland Barthes connects \u201cthe pleasure of the text,\u201d or what he calls \u201ca jouissance of meaning\u201d (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 \u00e9criture, \u201cas a negativity, a movement that questions all \u2018identity\u2019 (whether linguistic, corporeal, or historical)\u201d (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\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201caesthetic religion.\u201d All being and its thoughts are thus fragments. Being, the I, say, or its \u201cme,\u201d is divided at least, more likely multiple, so fragmented, and so can be accurately presented or represented only as a fragment. As Rodolphe Gasch\u00e9 puts it in his essay\u00adlength Foreword to Friedrich Schlegel\u2019s Philosophical Fragments (Univer-sity of Minnesota, 1991), and Schlegel has as much impact on literary criticism as he did on philosophy:<\/div>\n
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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<\/div>\n
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my knowledge never been attended to explicitly. What should be obvious is that if the fragment, or rather its notion, is to bring out the radical atotality of writing, or the text, it must be a notion of fragment thoroughly distinct from its (historically) prevailing notion(s). A concept of the fragment that merely emphasizes incompletion, residualness, detachment, or brokenness will not serve here. A piece struck by incompletion, a detached piece, a piece left over from a broken whole, or even an erratic piece, is structurally linked with the whole or totality of which it would have been, or of which it has been, a part. (Gasch\u00e9 1991: vii).<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Gasch\u00e9 goes on to trace a genealogy of the fragment:<\/div>\n
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[…] it is well established that Friedrich Schlegel introduced the form of the frag-ment into German literature after the strong impression he received from the publication in 1795 of Chamfort\u2019s Pens\u00e9es, maximes et anecdotes\u2014the Roman-tic fragment is not a pens\u00e9e, maxim, saying, opinion, anecdote, or remark, all of which are marked by only relative incompletion, and which receive their unity from the subject who has authored them [and this is a solution Beckett has resisted throughout his creative career]. Although Friedrich Schlegel refers to it as the \u201cChamfortian form,\u201d the Romantic fragment is, as Philippe Lacoue\u00adLabarthe and Jean\u00adLuc Nancy have shown, \u201ca determinate and deliberate statement, assuming or transfiguring the accidental and involuntary aspects of fragmentation.\u201d The Romantic fragment \u201caims at fragmentation for its own sake.\u201d (Gasch\u00e9 1991: viii).<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy<\/em>, picks up the thread:<\/div>\n
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The fragment is among the most characteristic figures of the Romantic move-ment. Although it has predecessors in writers like Chamfort (and earlier in the aphoristic styles of moralists like Pascal and La Rochefoucauld), the fragment as employed by Schlegel and the Romantics is distinctive in both its form (as a collection of pieces by several different authors) and its purpose. For Schlegel, a fragment as a particular has a certain unity (\u201c[a] fragment, like a small work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog,\u201d Athenaeumsfragment 206), but remains nonethe-less fragmentary in the perspective it opens up and in its opposition to other fragments. Its \u201cunity\u201d thus reflects Schlegel\u2019s view of the whole of things not as a totality but rather as a \u201cchaotic universality\u201d of infinite opposing stances (https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/schlegel\/<\/a>)<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Samuel Beckett takes up the issue directly in 1975\u20131976 with his translations, rather transformations or adaptations called, Long after Chamfort, that is, both of a time long gone and very far from Chamfort\u2019s versions, which are themselves often re\u00adrenderings. In his scathing review of Samuel Beckett: Poems 1930\u20131989, Christo-pher Ricks puts the matter in The Guardian on 31 May 2002,<\/div>\n
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A sequence of translations from Chamfort \u2013 not \u201cAfter Chamfort\u201d but \u201cLong After Chamfort\u201d, and that is not just a historical insistence \u2013 includes the Indi-an proverb upon which Chamfort muses: \u201cIl vaut mieux \u00eatre assis que debout, couch\u00e9 qu\u2019assis, mort que tout cela.\u201d In Beckett\u2019s calloused, workaday hands, this becomes:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Better on your arse than on your feet,<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot.<\/div>\n
(Ricks 2002: n.p).<\/div>\n
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Such radical concision and metonymy are manifest in other work of this period, the poem Something there<\/em> (1974), for instance, whose metonym is the eye (as it was earlier in his Film<\/em>):<\/div>\n
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something there
where
out there
out where
outside what
the head what else
something there somewhere outside
the head<\/div>\n
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at the faint sound so brief
it is gone and the whole globe
not yet bare
the eye
opens wide
wide
till in the end
nothing more
shutters it again<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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so the odd time
out there
somewhere out there
like as if
as if
something
not life
necessarily<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Example 1, Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em><\/h2>\n

As Stephen Dedalus contemplates trying to evade paying his outstanding debts in James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses, he has a flash of insight: \u201cWait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound\u201d (9.205\u201306). As he reviews moments from his own history as past versions of himself, other Is, he rather elegantly express-es the conundrum in terms of punctuation: \u201cI, I and I. I.\u201d (9.212). The person who borrowed the money, that is, is not \u201cI\u201d any longer, as \u201cI\u201d am now other than he who borrowed, since he, the other I, exists \u201cunder everchanging forms.\u201d By the time he says \u201cI,\u201d he is already other amid his \u201ceverchanging forms.\"<\/p>\n

But a certain consistency of forms remains if not constant at least stable, and hence recognizable, he continues, \u201cBut I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by mem-ory because under everchanging forms.\u201d What continuity exists between \u201cI and I\u201d or \u201cI\u201d and \u201cI as other,\u201d is a function of memory that appears inescapable since always present, but what if memory falters, fails for some reason as in some form of illness \u2013 amnesia, dementia or Alzheimer\u2019s, say, disruptions of the body\u2019s neural connections, all. The I and the no longer I, the not I, say, are linked by a fragile neural bridge of memory, which, while always part of the present, is not always available and retrievable, at least at will, what French novelist Marcel Proust would call \u2013 and Beckett would explore \u2013 \u201cvoluntary memory,\u201d the ability to retrieve and so connect with the past at will.<\/p>\n

Stephen\u2019s memory returns him playfully to the money he owes to an Irish mysti-cal poet named George Russel, or to his pen name \u201cAeon.\u201d He goes by and published under its shortened version of AE, and so Stephen recalls \u201cAEIOU,\u201d and so Stephen has, as Adam Piette phrases it, \u201cthe inability to forget\u201d (Piette 1996: 146), as memory ties him to his past self, his other I that Stephen willfully tries to forget \u2013 his (and Ireland\u2019s) inseparably bound history, which is written memory, in Stephen\u2019s case per-sonal, familial, cultural and religious, but he fails to forget. That nexus of history is \u2013 as he tells his employer, the headmaster of the school that employs him, Mr Deasy in the \u201cProteus\u201d chapter of Ulysses \u2013 \u201ca nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.\u201d<\/p>\n

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That is, as Stephen attempts to evade, outmaneuver, ignore or simply deny the con-straints of his past \u2013 his consubstantial family, his conflicted, divided and dominated nation, his religious training (and indoctrination, it turns out) \u2013 he thinks through the meaning of \u201cI,\u201d what or who am \u201cI,\u201d and, what is as central since always connected, the denial, the \u201cnot I.\u201d Somehow, however, the \u201cnot I\u201d always seems centrally part of and so connected to the I. That is how definitions work, of course, by opposites, inclusions and exclusions, Aristotle tells us \u2013 and Stephen is very Aristotelian \u2013 what is in the category and, just as important, what is not \u2013 what is \u201cI\u201d and what is outside of, other than \u201cI.\u201d The not I then is not simply a denial of being or ontological identity, but its alterity, its otherness against which \u2013 and only against which \u2013 we can know the \u201cI.\u201d \u201cNot\u201d is thus a constituent part of \u201cI,\u201d the \u201cI\u201d unthinkable without the \u201cnot I,\u201d a key component of the definition, and of being itself.<\/div>\n
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That split in, or the multiplicity of \u201cI\u201d that Stephen posits, is something of a fairly recent problem for humanity, for the human species. It is, of course, inscribed in language grammatically in a double pronominal form, an \u201cI\u201d and a \u201cme,\u201d as being, the self can be both subject, \u201cI,\u201d and object \u201cme,\u201d in discourse or conversation. The split has inflected philosophical thought, however, only since Ren\u00e9 Descartes (1596\u20131650), often considered the first \u201cmodern\u201d philosopher since he acknowledged a split in being, the self, between, a thinking feature and an acting feature, between, say, mind and body. He famously elided the rift with a constant, \u201cI,\u201d however, cogito ergo sum he proclaimed in the academic language of the day, Latin, \u201cI think there-fore I am,\u201d in translation. He got there through what he calls his Discourse upon Method, which was to doubt everything until one reached a point or a proposition that one could no longer doubt. For Descartes that was the existence of the thinker, the self, \u201cI\u201d itself, which was for Descartes an irrefutable certainty. It became a foun-dation for philosophy, a platform on which Descartes could build other premises and propositions.<\/div>\n
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Immanuel Kant (1724\u20131804), on the other hand, would take issue with what amounts to a tautology in Descartes\u2019 thinking since the \u201cI\u201d is already present in the first part of the equation as he restated the disjunction, the split in something we might call \u201cself\u201d or \u201cbeing.\u201d That is, Descartes had already assumed what he was trying to prove. Russell Sbriglia explains Kant\u2019s opposition thus:<\/div>\n
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Whereas Descartes presumed that the act of the cogito renders self\u00adpresent and self \u00adtransparent the res cogitans [that is, the category \u2018thinking thing\u2019], Kant reveals the impossibility of these two entities, Descartes\u2019 \u201cradical dualism\u201d [the thinking thing and the thing thought, matter, res extensa] ever coinciding or overlapping. [That is, the thing thought must always be other than the thing thinking.] In Kant\u2019s idealist nomenclature, the \u201cI\u201d of \u201ctranscendental appercep-tion\u201d [that is, seeing a self from outside the self] and the \u201cI or he or it (the<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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thing) which thinks\u201d [that is, what that transcendental self sees] are forever incommensurable; the former, what is seen, can only ever be a \u201csimple, and in itself completely empty, representation\u201d of the latter, that which is doing the seeing, an emptiness, which Kant designates via an \u201cX\u201d [Kant, 1929, 331]. The \u201cI\u201d as \u201csimple […] completely empty, representation\u201d is an \u201cX,\u201d an unknown and hence a \u201cnot I.\u201d What the \u201cI\u201d is perceiving itself in an act of apperception can never also be coeval with what is doing the perceiving \u2013 they must needs be separate and different entities \u2013 the one not the other, the one perhaps empty, an empty signifier, the I trying to perceive itself views an \u201cX,\u201d an emptiness, a not \u201cI\u201d. (Sbriglia 2022: 222\u2013225).<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Slovoj \u017di\u017eek explains that \u201cthe \u2018I\u2019 exists only as ex\u00adsisting, at a distance from the \u2018thing\u2019 that it is\u201d (\u017di\u017eek 2019: 66). This is the paradox of self\u00adconsciousness with which Kant confronts us, that, as \u017di\u017eek phrases it, \u201cI am conscious of myself only insofar as I am out of reach to myself qua the real kernel of my being [\u2018I\u2019 or he or it (the thing) which thinks\u2019],\u201d that \u201cI cannot acquire consciousness of myself in my capacity of the \u2018Thing which thinks\u2019\u201d (Kant cited by \u017di\u017eek 2009:15). But what is the relationship between this empty \u201cX\u201d and the subject itself, the \u201cI\u201d? The point here is not to solve such disjunctions, the conflicted nature of the I. \u017di\u017eek\u2019s point is that such disjunction is insoluble and yet central to the illusory nature of being. While such issues remain a perpetual feature of ontological philosophy, that enigma itself can be explored creatively.<\/div>\n
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But the self, or what we generally call the \u201cI,\u201d is evidently a fairly recent inven-tion, what the German philosopher Johanne Gottlieb Fichte, an intellectual descen\u00addent from Immanuel Kant, would call the \u201cIch,\u201d the \u201cI.\u201d Like his predecessors Kant and Descartes, he was interested in subjectivity, consciousness, or more particularly self\u00adawareness or self\u00adconsciousness, our sense of ourselves, not in and of itself, but as the center of everything, and we can pretty much date the invention of the \u201cI,\u201d not only in Germany but the tiny university town of Jena, and at a particular time, at the end of the 18th century, roughly 1789. Goethe was there, as were the Schlegels, August Wilhelm and his wife Caroline, who were translating Shakespeare into Ger-man verse, and Friedrich Schelling\u2019s naturphilosophy, or Romantische Naturphilo\u00adsophie, would see the self as one with everything living. This would extend German idealism but develop Romanticism as well, and art, literary or plastic, that is, imagi\u00adnative or material, was its expression and union. Creating what we generally call Modernism, James Joyce was fascinated with German idealism, and with Goethe in particular, as were T. S. Eliot and, our subject in the present text, Samuel Beckett. Those issues dominated his post\u00adWar series of French novels, loosely called the tril-ogy. Between their writing, he wrote plays, and the stage offered Beckett alternate possibilities for exploring such issues.<\/div>\n
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So, if we follow Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, the most contemporary of our cited philosophers, what we perceive as our self, what Kant called apperception, can only be an empty cipher, an \u201cX,\u201d a nothing, since what we are is separate and doing the perceiving. Transfer such theorizing to the stage, as Beckett often did. That is, Beckett has always been less interested in telling stories with traditional conflicts and resolutions than in exploring problems that involve human existence as the felt experience of life: what appears on stage, for instance, is self\u00adevidently such an appearance as well \u2013 and thus not a real something; even as it may appear in the guise of the real, it is empty of significance; at best it is an appearance of the real, so all theatre at least, if not all art, entails a philosophical problem beyond the story it tells or the world it tries to represent \u2013 what is real and what is not, is something else, or where do we find the real \u2013 outside the artwork, outside the theater, perhaps, or within, inside the characters, inside ourselves. But what if the appearance does not coincide with or denies the story being told, the story not that of the appearance we witness, the story that of another, which, nonetheless, is connected with the teller.<\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/div>\n

Example 2, Mouth and the Not I<\/em><\/h2>\n
Beckett was uncertain about whether or not this piece he conceived for theater was theater at all, whether it was theater or something else. His American director Alan Schneider was equally unsure and puzzled for its world premiere scheduled for the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, New York, 22 November 1972, with Jessica Tandy as Mouth and Henderson Forsythe as Auditor (Hume Cronyn is mistakenly listed as Auditor in the Grove Press edition).<\/div>\n
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American actress Jessica Tandy experienced enormous difficulties in the role. Schneider wrote to Beckett on 3 September 1972: \u201cBecause Jessie having great psychological problem with learning lines in Happy Days and Not I at same time, we have been working with small \u2018teleprompter,\u2019 which has her Not I lines printed on roller controlled by stage mgr. She\u2019ll be using this until quite sure of lines; this mechanism, of course unseen by audience\u201d (Harmon 1998: 279). Tandy was never quite weaned from the technology and found the experience of following Beckett\u2019s theatrical dictates exasperating. When she complained directly to Beckett that the running time of 23 minutes rendered the work unintelligible to audiences, Beckett telegraphed back his famous (but oft misinterpreted) injunction: \u201cI\u2019m not unduly concerned with intelligibility. I want the piece to work on the nerves of the audience\u201d (cited in Gontarski 1997: 91). The play worked on the nerves of one other actress, Bil-lie Whitelaw: \u201cNot I came through the letter\u00adbox. I opened it, read it, and burst into tears, floods of tears. It had a tremendous emotional impact on me. I knew then that it had to go at great speed\u201d (Whitelaw 1978: 86). Her work on Play<\/em> a decad<\/div>\n
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earlier had prepared her for the extraordinary ordeal of Not I. The experience was nerve\u00adwracking. Blindfolded with yet another hood secured over her face, she suf-fered sensory deprivation in performance: \u201cThe very first time I did it, I went to piec-es. I felt I had no body; I could not relate to where I was; and, going at that speed, I was becoming very dizzy and felt like an astronaut tumbling into space. I swore to God I was falling\u201d (Whitelaw 1978: 86).<\/div>\n
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Schneider\u2019s ten questions to Beckett in his letter of 3 September suggest yet again how baffled he was by this new (in all senses) play; that is, as was often the case, Schneider was asking the wrong questions: \u201cHate to be too specific because I know how you are about defining meanings. I think she\u2019s dead, can\u2019t believe it, refuses to believe it, accept it, pushed thought away, can only deal with it in terms of someone else, cannot imagine it for herself\u201d (Harmon 1998: 283\u2013284). In his response on 16 October Beckett reminded Schneider that he was not a traditional or a Realist playwright: \u201cI no more know where she is or why thus than she does. All I know is in the text. \u2018She\u2019 is purely a stage entity, part of a stage image and purveyor of a stage text. The rest is Ibsen.\u201d To one of Schneider\u2019s questions about the play Beckett responded bluntly: \u201cThis is complete misunderstanding\u201d; and concluded his letter with a cutting assessment: \u201cThe remains of some convention seems to lie between us\u201d (Harmon 1998: 283\u2013284).<\/div>\n
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Part of what puzzled Schneider, Tandy, and most early audiences was the neo\u00adsurrealist, metonymic stage image, a pair of spotlit lips some eight feet above stage level (Mouth), all that is left of a body Mouth calls the machine, and a ghostly, shadowy, silent figure who makes four brief movements \u201cof helpless compassion\u201d (Auditor). That is, Mouth has an audience within the play as written, but it is often performed without that representation of an audience whose actions may mimic our own. The audience experiences some 23 minutes not of comprehensible mono-logue but of linguistic ejaculation, logorrhea, language as machine gun, say. Mouth\u2019s speech, Beckett said, is \u201cpurely a buccal phenomenon\u201d (Harmon 1998: 283). Mouth is apparently possessed by a voice whose story recounts a loveless childhood and life for some 70 years when inexplicably she blacks out. Conscious and sentient she first thinks she is being punished for her sins, but she is not suffering. In addition to the buzzing she hears in her skull, there is a light, meant to torment, as in Play. She feels no pain, as in life she felt no pleasure, even when she was supposed to. At best she could perform a scream, like Winnie in Happy Days, but the \u201cshe\u201d recog-nizes that after years of speechlessness, even in the supermarket or the courtroom, words were now flowing from her. She recognizes the voice as her own by vowel sounds \u201cshe had never heard […] elsewhere.\u201d Beckett\u2019s suggestions for pronunci-ation (which he reminded Schneider has nothing to do with an Irish accent) were: baby as \u201cbabby,\u201d any as \u201canny,\u201d either as \u201ceether,\u201d etc. Her reasonable thought is that she must have something to tell but never knows what. In addition to this<\/div>\n
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enigma is the tension between the speaking voice and the \u201cI\u201d of identity or con-sciousness, of a unified character that Mouth continues to resist despite the prod-dings of some force, on occasion represented by an Auditor on stage. To this refus-al of Mouth to acknowledge that she is one with the voice and so might use the first person pronoun, the Auditor responds with his four gestures. He alone has any apprehension of the text, according to Beckett, the audience sharing Mouth\u2019s con-fusion (Harmon 1998: 283).<\/div>\n
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We have what appears to be a monologue presented by a body part, a fragment, a Mouth. Is this body part, this fragment of being attached to anything? What, in short, is it a fragment of? The lips we see need to be attached to other systems if they are to function, to neural and circulatory machinery, but can we, or should we imagine such a larger apparatus, since even that would be a fragment, a part of something else, which, in turn, would be a part of something else. That is, the lips we see illuminated high on a platform, a stage, so called, are part of a system of com-munication in at least two senses, or part of at least two systems, the neuro\u00adelec-trical bio system that allows muscle movement and the system of communication, a semiotic system that allows art to speak. That is a literary practice, which, accord-ing to Julia Kristeva, channeling Roland Barthes, is a \u201clocated literary practice at the intersection of subject and history.\u201d Barthes could study \u201cthis practice as symptom of the ideological tearings in the social fabric\u201d (Kristeva 1980: 93). Barthes\u2019 connect-ing \u201cthe pleasure of the text\u201d or \u201ca jouissance of meaning\u201d (Kristeva 2000: 188) with a definition of writing (\u00e9criture) \u201cas a negativity, a movement that questions all \u2018identity\u2019 (whether linguistic, corporeal, or historical)\u201d (Kristeva 2000: 193) reso-nated with Kristeva\u2019s interest in meaning production as a combined effort between affects and drives on one side (the semiotic) and the symbolic law on the other (society, history). All these theoretical affinities between Kristeva\u2019s and Barthes\u2019 work are held together by his challenge of meaning itself which he relates to a con-ception of the subject as non\u00adunified, shifting and dispersed. Questioning \u201ca unity \u2013 an \u2018I\u2019, a \u2018we\u2019 \u2013 that can have meaning or seek meaning,\u201d Barthes encounters the limits of \u201cthe possibility of meaning itself\u201d and offers instead \u201cthe abyss of a polyva-lence of meaning, as well as a polyphony internal to subjects investigating meaning\u201d (Kristeva 2000: 189).<\/div>\n
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But theater has traditionally offered another sort of presence, an embodiment of text which entails something of a co\u00adpresence in theater, performers and observers, listeners, auditors who function like readers. Beckett has mimicked this theatrical co\u00adpresence within the play itself as monologue becomes something of a dialogue, or duologue, a mouth, functioning as text, and an auditor or Listener functioning as reader \u2013 at least as written. Whether or not contemporary directors choose to stage such an echo of the theatrical experience, is open to directorial choice, even according to Beckett.<\/div>\n
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By way of conclusion, and in short, I would posit that Mouth in Not I<\/em> becomes on stage a pressing emblem for Modern literature, theater, and philosophy.<\/div>\n
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References<\/h3>\n