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Broken English WhatW eMabe of F~a~ments ". . . by what languageother thanfragmentary-other than the langqqe ofshattering, of infinitedispersal-can time be marked . . . ?" -Maurice Blanchot, The Writingof theDisaster T * he fragment is a form a7eapproach in aftermath (its other status, as the product of forethought, is rarer, and sponsors a special set of reflections, some of which I'll come to later). The study of fragments is the study of time's effects, and an artifact's endurances.Poets establish what remains, sang Holderlin, himself the poet of the fragmentary, and what remains in time are fragments, traces, debris. Nothing lasts longer than ruins, Brodsky remarked. And time reduces works to patterns of extent and extinction; yields up fortunes of was, not will. Still, the fact of fragmentation creates the possibility of the fragmentable : and this is the mind's art, the art of apprehension and precaution (for the mind can make time, for a time, seem small). The writer around whom the rummaging or rubbling of deterioration goes on represents us to something, rather than representing something to us. For just as the act changes in time, the reader changes in the act (you never read the same book twice).What we mean at the moment we write and what we mean at the moment we are read are both bifold (transitive and in-); so literary meaning starts fourfold and goes from there, split on split. In a charged field, difference makes things spin. This essay is itself a piece in pieces: my own energies tend toward centrifugal spray rather than tidy consolidation. My sources are wildly Broken English 69 various: they range from tatters of Archilochus (recoveredfrom German mummy-windings) to Tom Phillips's book-breakage.Friedrich Schlegel (dean of the Romantic fragmentists) took pains to distinguish the fragment of intent from that of mere extent: "Many works of the ancients have become fragments; many works of the moderns begin that way."18 But in- or ex-, it is the tending of text I am interested in. I turn by nature toward the patterns of accident, the accident of patterns.We mean one way, and then another: mean to, then wind up, quite intransitively, meaning otherwise. The composings of the Atheneum group (Schlegelet al.) were written not to be, but to have been, broken: their fragments were intended as small wholes, as apothegms or epigrams. And though the authorial intent was to shift prose from the explicative toward the implicative, these pieces are in fact tendentious, as a whole: they direct the reader; they have direction's end in mind. "One should drill:' says Schlegel, "where the board is thickest."19 The point of drilling the hole in the thickest part is to intend the hole: is to protect its shape. And from what?The ravages of time's holemaking , which works where the material's thinnest. The hole intended is protected from the hole extended (mind against time, which threatens all our groundworks-whether of wood, or stone, or ideology). What we have of many Greek poets is what was left after the epochsof accident passed them on to us-papyruses partly rotted, stoneworksbrokene20 When now we try to reconstruct their shape,we do so around the work of an unintended, unintending shapemaker:time's patterns may be chancy but they're not chaotic. Behind time's excerpting, there remains the idea of the original, itself from the outset a piece of something. A look at Heraclitus is a look at a collectionof nuggets, for he writes, as far as we can tell even on reconstruction, in bon mots or witticisms. These were preserved by later commentators and by the memories of his listeners , whose records then were eaten away by age before we got them. The hallmark of the joke or witticism everywhere is its capacity to be remembered and repeated; a certain combination of portability, packedness and persistence is characteristic, even requisite. The Heraclitus his preservers have passed on to us is a wag: a lund of pre-Socratic standup comic, surviving in quick jabs, polished gems, one-liners. This kind of fragment beats time to time's prerogative: even after the papyrus falls apart, the pieces seem unbroken. This is aphorism's gift, its present. By contrast the fragments of Archilochus and Empedocles seem not so much rearticulated as disarticulated: their missing parts (like Dickinson 's dashes) are indispensable connectors. Instead of intact one-liners, [18.188.142.146] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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