A Poetics of Literary Allusion

310 ANNA WHITESIDE tenns as informed by an immanent teleology that makes it the speculative and partial manifestation of a future whole. Either way, however, he thinks of fragments as nostalgically or dialectically related to wholes which, even if they are imaginary, possess the psychic reality of myths. Yet it does not follow that the notion of a fragment inevitably involves 'A whole from which it is broken off' (p 50). The final poems of Keats and Shelley begin and abruptly terminate in medias res, and their concentration on an episode stripped of its explanatory context acknowledges their existence within a historical process that may lack an origin or telos. In this respect they stand in contrast to Keats's Hyperion, where Oceanus's survey of divine history projects what McFarland would call a 'whole of faith' against which the incompleteness of the poem can be measured. Among aesthetically legitimate fragments it is therefore possible to distinguish between works which conceive of wholeness as an absent reality, works like those of Blake which use dialectic and polarity and therefore place the notion of wholeness at risk in a world of process and negativity while continuing to believe in it, and lastly works like the final poems of Keats and Shelley whose fragmentariness is radically existential rather than Neoplatonic, Hegelian, or Jasperian. More than one kind of fragmentation may, ofcourse, exist in a single work or canon. The conflation in the last chapter of thinkers as diverse as Plato, Jaspers, and Same blurs the metaphysical differences between various types of fragments, and the restriction of this study to Wordsworth and Coleridge leaves unanswered the question of whether the assumptions behind the fragment changed from early to later Romanticism. Equally interesting is the question of genre. A theory of the fragment as an epiphanic window into eternity may be appropriate to the lyrical fragment, but epic fragments such as The Triumph ofLife situate themselves in the historical world and therefore do not devalue existence in favour of essence in the manner assumed by the final chapter. Any future discussion of the fragment will have to deal with distinct psychological, metaphysical, generic, and historical 'modalities' offragmentation. ThatMcFarland's book opens such possibilities is its great strength. That it does not succeed in completing so ambitious an undertaking is perhaps only to be expected. A Poetics of Literary Allusion ANNA WHITESIDE Ruth Amossy. Les Jeux de l'aJ/usian litteraire dans 'Un beau tenebreux' de Julien Gracq Neuchatel: Editions de la Baconniere 1980. 198 In this study of Gracq's Un beau t€nebreux Ruth Amossy's purpose is twofold. She sets out to establish a poetics of the literary allusion, not so much as an isolated element, but as part of the dynamic process of literary creation and recreation: literary allusion in relation to different texts, genres, and historical periods. At the same time she examines Gracq's particularuse ofthe literary allusion as a means of UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 52, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1983 0042-Q247/8Y0500-031O-Q312$Ol.501o @ UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS LITERARY ALLUSION 311 determining the specific textual functioning of Un beau ten~breux. Not only does she trace the gamut of Gracq's different types of allusion - from quotations and proper names to pastiche and parody; she also explores their ironic function in seU-conscious literary creation: the subversive weaving of pre-existing texts into an intertext. Intertextuality becomes a metatextuaI game for Amossy, who shows how the intertext explores and finally explodes its models. Thus Allan, alias the Romantic Hero, is the mask and mirror of many literary romantic heroes (Goethe's Faust, Vigny's Lover of Montmorency, Stendhal's Napoleon, a hybrid Byronic and Hugolian Satan, among others). The absolute rnoi of Romanticism disintegrates into a parodic series of rnai whose essence, when the last mask is pulled away, is a void. Thus, too, the genre of the 'journal intime' which forms the first part of Un beau tenebreux is seen to wane in the wake of successive speakers who all usurp the writer's'!' through their intrusion into his monologue. The subject captures and is captured by the Other's discourse in its...