Samuel Beckett, Bram van Velde and the Television Plays Eh Joe and Quad I The Aesthetic Experience of the Abstract

In his essays on art, Samuel Beckett expresses his difficulty, not to say the impossibility, to describe his aesthetic experience. Commenting on abstract artworks, which break away from mimesis and its fidelity to reality, led Beckett to reject a certain kind of critical discourse. This article compares the writer’s work for the avant-garde magazine Transition at the end of the 1940s with his first TV play and two of his last, Eh Joe and Quad I.