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

1. Setting Out: Toward Irony, the Fragment, and the Fragmentary Work

1 Setting Out: Toward Irony, the Fragment, and the Fragmentary Work Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward;—for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left,—he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end;—but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly. . . . —Laurence Sterne The purpose of this book is to inquire into a conception of poetry that emerges with special clarity and force during the second half of the eighteenth century. This conception comes into particularly clear view in the 1790s in both German literary theory and English literary practice, although such a distinction between theory and practice is problematic as romantic theory is very much informed by early modern European, especially English, practice.1 As it happens, this conception finds its most compelling articulation in Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of “romantic poetry [romantische Poesie],” his call for a new and highly self-conscious literary work that embodies the fractured, decentered consciousness of ancient philosophical dialogue.2 Historically, this conception originates in the loosening of medieval Christendom’s grip on European culture and the emergence of  1  vernacular literatures, especially ones written in Romance languages, out from under the rock of a comparatively monolithic cultural paradigm . In fact, there is perhaps no single work more influential for the formulation of Schlegel’s conception of romantic poetry than Laurence Sterne’s late-eighteenth century shaggy dog of a novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), a text that repeatedly dissolves clear-cut distinctions between Latin and the vernacular, high and low styles of English, and religious and secular discursive registers.3 The critic Richard Lanham has gone so far as to describe Sterne as “a profound philosopher in—and of—the comic mode,” while Tristram Shandy has inspired poets and novelists from Byron and Carlyle to Flaubert and Mallarmé to Joyce and Beckett.4 One reason for the book’s lasting appeal is that it effectively dismantles traditional Aristotelian poetics , which hinges upon a distinction between form and content, with a display of linguistic anarchy that underwrites one of the premises of this book: that one can read Tristram Shandy as a point of origin for what Schlegel calls romantic poetry, or “the romantic genre [Dichtart]” (KA 2:183; LF 175). Romantic poetry in this sense is a hybrid genre that moves unpredictably back and forth between theory and practice; it exhibits both philosophical and literary, narrative and lyrical dimensions, and it contains both transparent and opaquely self-critical moments. In The Literary Absolute, their influential study of German romantic literary theory, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy articulate this tension in a useful way by describing the dialectical relationship between the fragmentary work and the fragment per se: This fragmentary essence of the dialogue has at least one consequence (among several others that we cannot explore here), namely that dialogue , similar in this to the fragment, does not properly constitute a genre. This is why the dialogue, like the fragment, turns out to be one of the privileged sites for taking up the question of genre as such.5 At issue here is the genealogy of a supergenre (a genre squared or raised exponentially to the next highest power) predicated on a rethinking of poetry, which has its origins in the novel’s displacement of the epic and the simultaneous recognition of the tremendous generic potential inherent in novelistic dialogue. The question of modern poetry, particularly the novel and its relationship to ancient epic and tragic poetry, is a question that is pursued in detail by several eminent theorists, 2  Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative including György Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Julia Kristeva.6 And yet it is not simply a question of how to think about the novel. What is at stake in such a conception of romantic...