Disjecta (book)
play by Samuel Beckett
Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (John Calder, 1983) is a collection of previously uncollected writings by Samuel Beckett, spanning his entire career. The title is derived from the Latin phrase "disjecta membra", meaning scattered remains or fragments, usually applied to written work.
The essays appear in their original language of composition (English, French, or German), as stipulated by Beckett, since the volume is intended for scholars who should be able to read several languages. Beckett himself did not value these pieces much, seeing them as "mere products of friendly obligation or economic need".
The collection includes Beckett's famous essay on an early version of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake which originally appeared in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress.
Contents
Foreword by Ruby Cohn
Part I: Essays at Esthetics
Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce – essay on Finnegans Wake
Le Concentrisme – an account of an imaginary poet and the movement supposedly founded by him (French)
Excerpts from Dream of Fair to Middling Women
German Letter of 1937 (German)
Les Deux Besoins (French)
Part II: Words about Writers
Other Writers
Mörike on Mozart
Feuillerat on Proust
Leishmann's Rilke translation
Thomas MacGreevy
Recent Irish poetry
Ezra Pound
Papini on Dante
Seán O'Casey
Censorship in the Street
Jack B. Yeats
Denis Devlin
McGreevy on Jack B. Yeats
Self
The Possessed
On Murphy (to McGreevy)
On Murphy (to Reavy)
On Works to 1951
On Endgame
On Play
On Murphy (to Sighle Kennedy)
Program note for Endgame
Part III: Words about Painters
Geer van Velde
La Peinture des van Velde (French)
Peintres de l'Empêchement (French)
Three Dialogues
Henri Hayden Homme-Peintre (French)
Hommage à Jack B. Yeats (French)
Henri Heyden
Bram van Velde
Pour Avigdor Arikha (French)
Part IV: Human Wishes
A One-Act fragment from an early historical play.
The play dramatized some episodes from the life of Samuel Johnson and takes its title from his long poem The Vanity of Human Wishes. The episodes taken dramatize Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale, and as such, draw from her Anecdotes and Diaries rather than the traditionally more popular Life of Samuel Johnson of James Boswell. The play was abandoned after the completion of the First Act.
The only known extant fragment was given by Beckett to Ruby Cohn.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Disjecta (book)” as play by Samuel Beckett. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as play by Samuel Beckett. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5282256. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1983, 1937 and 1951.
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