SubStance

A response, not a review
What is a review?
How can we respond when asked to do the impossible:
to look again, for the first time?
Experiment, I suppose, fragmentarily.

Introductory Paragraph

In this complex analysis of the genre of the fragment, Camelia Elias shows us that while there is no such thing as a fragment in the singular, there are always already a plurality of fragments at work in the history (and divides) of literature, philosophy, and theology. Although we can never, not quite, be sure of what a fragment is—whether a piece of language is in fact to be classified as a fragment—we must nonetheless "assign the fragment a status of which one can never be sure" (2). I like this uncertainty. It fragmentizes things from the beginning, but also lays the groundwork for the labor of making connections of fragments across time and significances. Mythoplokos, Anne Carson calls it, citing Sappho from the Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta. Weaving fictions. Elias weaves her textual fragments across the page of history.

Summary I

Moving from the pre-Socratics through the German Romantics, Elias proceeds to read Bénabou, Stein, Stern, Shakespeare, Blanchot, Jabès, Taylor, and Markson, among others, as she develops a typology of ten types of fragments. The first group, which focuses on "agency," includes what she calls the Coercive Fragment, the Consensual Fragment, the Redundant, Repetitive, and Resolute Fragment. The second group, which focuses to a greater extent on representation, includes the Ekphrastic Fragment; the Epigrammatic, Epigraphic, and Emblematic Fragment; and the Epitaphic Fragment. The first section, which is a presentation of the history of the fragment, offers a kind of latent performativity, while the second set—the fragments of postmodernity—exhibit a more active, manifest performativity. Taxonomies, for me, are soporific; I simply can't follow them. I can barely count, and the gene for grids was spliced out of my ancestry at some [End Page 172] unidentified point in the history of primates. So my eyelids become heavy and my head nods when I have to keep up with lists. Thank goodness Elias is such an intelligent writer, such a fine reader. She keeps me moving, keeps me bright-eyed as I leaf through the taxonomy of types.

Toward the end of The Fragment, Elias mentions that "the assumption that guides [the] whole book [is] that the fragment acquires a name only when it is performed, and that the fragment is only when it is something else…" (63). In Elias' terminology, Heraclitus's fragments coerce scholars and other readers into seeking their meaning through an encounter with what is not there, a situation that forces the imagination to begin its productive work of gathering and interpretation.

Leap ahead, then, along the shard-work of history to the German Romantics, especially to Friedrich Schlegel, the second wittiest man Elias knows (and not as bent as the first). The fragment, here, allows itself to be interpreted—it consents to a reading or a series of readings—but this consensuality occurs through the medium of wit, which of course undoes the possibility of any finality and keeps the fragment opening, infinitely.

As she moves into the modernist fragments of such writers as Stein, Aragon, and Cioran, Elias notes that her focus is on examining to what extent "redundancy, repetition, and resoluteness can be said to inform and be employed in the construction of the modernist fragment, though not as themselves but as their potentialities." In order to accomplish this, she has "chosen texts which engage with defining, where defining is a representation of its own potential" (120). The four rs are always at work, it appears, in the fragment that is the writing of modernity. But since definition is "style" and can of course never be completed, the fragment opens up its own potential. It throws itself ahead of its present into the future. This is the...