Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative: Schlegel, Byron, Joyce, Blanchot

Notes

Notes Chapter 1. Setting Out: Toward Irony, the Fragment, and the Fragmentary Work 1. Although Marjorie Levinson insists “[w]e should no longer elucidate English practice by German aesthetics” (The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form [Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986]. p. 11), one can nevertheless observe that German romantic theory is informed from the start by writers like Boccaccio, Cervantes, Dante, Shakespeare , Swift, Sterne, and Goethe. On these matters, see Stuart Barnett’s Critical Introduction to his translation of Friedrich Schlegel’s On the Study of Greek Poetry, trans., ed. Stuart Barnett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). Barnett’s response to critics who object to invoking Schlegel’s name in discussions of English romanticism is compelling and worth citing at some length: It is this large-scale, historical perspective that characterizes Schlegel’s approach to questions of literature from his “classicist” phase to his Romantic phase and on through his so-called Catholic-Conservative phase. It would be easy to conclude from the secondary literature in English that Schlegel, when he was not thinking obsessively about irony, only considered literature in a vacuum. Yet, despite what critics have implied, Schlegel did not think of literature in purely abstract terms. . . . Schlegel’s conception of literature was, from beginning to end, profoundly historical. Whatever pronouncements Schlegel did make about literature as such were always based upon detailed and rigorous historical study. Hence it is not just that the literature of antiquity consistently played a role in Schlegel’s thought. Rather, it is that Schlegel’s notion of Romanticism was from the outset predicated upon a broad, historical study of literature. Romanticism, accordingly, was not seen simply as a moment within which literature became conscious of itself; it was also seen as the fruition of the history of Western literature itself. Indeed, the very impetus for the conceptualization of the Romantic . . . was the search for a resolution to a cultural dilemma of massive historical proportions between classical and postclassical literature. (6)  177  For Schlegel’s original text, see Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie, ed. Ernst Behler (1979), Vol. 1 of Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett, Hans Eichner, et. al., 35 vols. to date (München: Ferdinand Schöningh; Zurich: Thomas, 1958-). 2. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Vol. 2: Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796-1801), ed. Hans Eichner (1967), p. 182; Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinda and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 175. Hereafter abbreviated KA and LF, respectively. In an assessment of Firchow’s translations, Hans Eichner points to several passages where different readings may be preferred. See his review of Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments in The German Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 3 (May, 1973): 478-81. For the most part, I follow Firchow’s translations of Schlegel’s writings. Where I have made alterations, or where I have followed the translation but feel that no English word or phrase can adequately render Schlegel’s German, I have supplied the German between brackets in the text. 3. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997). Hereafter abbreviated TS. In his essay “The Novel as Parody: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,” Viktor Shklovsky proclaims, “Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel in world literature.” See Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), p. 70. To the extent that novelistic discourse parodies philosophy’s dream of a realist epistemology predicated on essentially transparent speech (that is, the idea of a philosophical character ), this is of course right. My argument in this book, however, is that what Schlegel calls romantische Poesie internalizes this parody—inscribes the quarrel between philosophy and poetry into the working of the romantic work of art—and thus helps give birth to what we call literature or the literary absolute. Simon Critchley’s On Humor (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) includes a brief discussion of Tristram Shandy that sheds light on both its literary and philosophical stakes. Critchley writes: “What Sterne calls ‘the Shandian system’ is entirely made up of digressions.” This will surprise no one who has opened the book. Yet where do these digressions lead? What truth do they reveal? Critchley muses: Perhaps this: that through the meandering circumlocutions of Tristram Shandy . . . we progressively approach the things themselves, the various pragmata that make up the stuff...