Gerald L. Bruns - Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature

This book takes its point of departure from a passage in Erich Auerbachs Mimesis, where many years ago I first ran across the notion of parataxis. It occurs, among other places, in his chapter on The Song of Roland, a poem that refuses to follow the traditional logic of sequential narrative: Instead of a process of complex and periodic development, we have repeated returns to the starting point, each one proceeding to elaborate a different element or motif: in all cases rationally organized condensations are avoided in favor of a halting, spasmodic, juxtapositive, and pro- and retrogressive method in which causal, modal, and even temporal relations are obscured (2003: 105).

This passage inspired in me a long since lapsed ambition, namely to write a history of fragmentary writing. The present book is something of an effort to pursue that ambition by exploring a variety of examples of self-interrupting composition, starting with some brief pages on Friedrich Schlegels inaugural theory and practice of the fragment as an assertion of the autonomy of words, their freedom from rule-governed hierarchies. Following Schlegels idea of a poetry of poetrypoetry that is no longer in the service of the church, the state, the school, or any official categories of thought and discoursethe first chapter provides a short history of the fragment as a distinctive feature of literary modernism from Gertrude Stein to Paul Celan and beyond to the present time. The second chapter attends to the later work of Maurice Blanchot and Samuel Beckett and argues that Blanchots writings on the fragment during the 1950s and early 1960s helped to inspire Becketts turn toward the paratactic prose of Comment Cest (1964) and the even more radical fragmentary fiction of his later years (Worstward Ho, for example). Meanwhile, part II of the book studies the radically paratactic arrangements of two contemporary British poets (major figures of the so-called Cambridge school), J. H. Prynne and John Wilkinson, and focuses chiefly on their most recent, and arguably most recondite, works.

A subtext of these proceedings is that any break with what Auerbach calls classical syntax (2003: 105) is a break with the whole Western tradition ofapologetics that, starting with Aristotle and continuing through Wordsworths preface to the Lyrical Ballads and even to this day, attempts to endow poetry with a philosophical seriousness. For example, in one of the first substantial essays on the work of Gertrude Stein, the poet John Ashbery likened her writing to that of the later Henry James. But Steins innovations are invariably (and inimitably) comic.

Thus chapter 5 may seem at first as a bit of a digression, but in fact, it is itself something of a parody of the apologetics tradition, and it opens the way to a close study of the poetry and poetics of Charles Bernsteinparadoxically a poet heavily influenced by the philosopher Stanley Cavell, whose entire work (like Wittgensteins) is an effort to relocate philosophy at ground level, among the details of everyday life, whose familiarity so often renders us oblivious to the world we in fact inhabit. The hard fact (as Bernsteins poetic career painfully demonstrates) is that this reality is as vulnerable to catastrophe, both public and personal, as it is to the ludic particulars of ordinary experience. Throughout it all, however, Bernsteins ear is tuned to comic one-liners derived from the American idiom that, beginning with William Carlos Williams, so much of American poetry has celebrated.

The final two chapters take up James Joycefirst, the language of Finnegans Wake. Whereas up until now parataxis has concerned the breakup of sentences or their juxtaposition as opposed to their periodic development, here the concern is with the breakup of the word itself, its reassembly into puns, neologisms, nonsense, and even random strings of letters. How to read, or at all events cope with, such alphabetic play? Critical tradition mainly counsels reading as the repair of Joyces language, restoring it to plain English. Or, much to the same effect, the practice has been to disregard the linguistic surface in favor of deep-structure analyses that claim to lay bare the works logic of construction. But what if one does not bypass the (invariably comic) experience of the words themselves? Suppose one follows, among other courses, Julia Kristevas writings on our erotic relation to words, or the example of Jacques Derridas Wakean Glas? As I have often tried to show over the years, the experience of the materiality of language is one of the principal aesthetic achievements of literary modernism.

The final chapter might seem in this event like a step back from language, but its topic is the paratactic experience of mirrors in Joyces fiction, particularly in Dubliners, the Portrait, and Ulysses, where mirror experiences are invariably interruptions, discontinuities, or (especially in the Circe episode of Ulysses) metaphorical displacements and proliferations of self-identity. As the philosopherEmmanuel Levinas says in Reality and Its Shadow, a person bears on his face, alongside of its being with which he coincides, its own caricature (1987: 6). Or, as Stephen Dedalus discovers, our faces seem to multiply as we encounter others during the day (1986: 175). We are not so much ourselves as juxtapositions of alterity. In any event, we seem to have come full circle from the German romanticsfor example, Novalis: The I must be divided into order to be I (Schulte-Sasse 1997: 102); or again: The I is only thinkable by means of a Non-I; for an I is only an I insofar as it is a Non-I. Otherwise it could be whatever it wanted to be, it just wouldnt be an I (107).

Je est un autre. (Rimbaud 1962: 6)

The epilogue returns to the writings of Gertrude Stein and her anarchic temporality of begin again and again (1972: 305), that is, writing in a continuous present (1971: 25) that in principle could go on without endfor example,