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

5. From the Fragmentary Work to the Fragmentary Imperative: Blanchot and the Quest for Passage to the Outside

5 From the Fragmentary Work to the Fragmentary Imperative: Blanchot and the Quest for Passage to the Outside (Friedrich Schlegel’s fragmentary will is the very will to the Work . . . But what Blanchot calls the fragmentary exigency exceeds the work, because that exigency exceeds the will.) —Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy Granted, Socrates does not write; but, beneath the voice, it is nevertheless through writing that he gives himself to others as the perpetual subject perpetually destined to die. He does not speak; he questions. Questioning, he interrupts and interrupts himself without cease, giving form to the fragmentary; through his death, he cause speech to be haunted by writing . . . —Maurice Blanchot If the writings of Byron and Joyce are the apotheosis of romantic poetry’s fragmentary work, Blanchot articulates a further distinction between the fragmentary work and the fragmentary imperative.1 In an essay on the German romantics, Blanchot registers his dissatisfaction with Schlegel’s tendency to pull up short when confronted with the most exacting demands of writing. In Schlegel’s case, says Blanchot , “the fragment often seems a means for complacently abandoning oneself to the self rather than an attempt to elaborate a more rigorous mode of writing” (EI 526; IC 359). Blanchot seems to be thinking of the literary vertigo that consumed, for example, Coleridge, a great thinker and as Mill rightly recognized one of the spirits of the age. But he was also unable to finish works once they were begun; finding himself  151  almost pathologically unable to achieve the kind of completion he sought, he all but abandoned poetry. He littered his life with bits and pieces of unfinished business, scraps of lectures, outlines of essays, long dreamed-of (but never executed) master works.2 In Blanchot’s eyes, a poet like Coleridge tells a cautionary tale (as does Byron), having wasted an opportunity to explore the outer limits of discursive reason and the interstices of the universe. More generally, for Blanchot the romantics think of the fragment too narrowly, in terms of the broken or dilapidated classical artifact or the exotic textual fragment rather than as a much more essential component of a more radical kind of writing, thinking, and living. Let me explore this idea further by returning to a work mentioned previously, Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds. Fontenelle published this little book in the seventeenth century amidst great scienti fic and religious unrest. When it first appeared, the Roman Catholic Church found itself increasingly on the defensive: Protestant religious leaders were seeking to displace it theologically, while a new experimental and empirical science was displacing it epistemologically. The world, it seemed, was breaking away from its traditional foundations. As Nina Rattner Gelbart points out in her Introduction to the English translation, Fontenelle courted danger when he wrote his pioneering work in 1686. Less than a century earlier, in 1600, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for, among other offences, desacrilizing the Earth by suggesting the possibility of multiple inhabited worlds in the universe. Only fifty years before Fontenelle wrote, Galileo had lost his freedom and had been placed under permanent house arrest for writing on daring astronomical theories.3 What specifically were the ideas that made this book so dangerous? Well, among other things, following Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, and Galileo, Fontenelle offered a radically new picture of the universe and, what is more, of what it means to learn, think, and acquire knowledge of it.4 Fontenelle’s universe is a universe of pluralities, a universe of many different worlds, each filled with stars and moons in the face of which, to rephrase a line from Blake, almost anything is possible to be believed. Our only apparent limitation as seekers of knowledge, as one of the characters in the Conversations puts it, is our eyesight.5 One imagines Bakhtin nodding in agreement. 152  Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative The book, structured around a series of conversations that take place between a Marquise and her older male companion over the course of five evenings, begins less like a quasi-scientific treatise on astronomy or cosmology and more like the prelude to a kiss. “The First Evening” begins with the older gentleman describing the scene: One evening after supper we went to walk in the garden. There was a delicious breeze, which made up for the extremely hot day we had...