The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (review)

Reviews Elizabeth Wanning Harries. The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. xi + 215pp. US$29.50. ISBN 0-8139-1502-3. Elizabeth Wanning Harries's The Unfinished Manner is a worthy winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize. Her study of the fragment is at once comparative and interdisciplinary . Treating Italian, French, and German, as well as English fragments, she neither confines her investigation to the later eighteenth century nor limits her interpretations to literature. Aware that the literary fragment has analogues in painting (the sketch), sculpture (the torso), and architecture (the ruin), she advances a theory of the fragment mat is astonishingly comprehensive, given the relative brevity of her book. The range and number of primary works considered are impressive, as are her informed and often pungent interventions into currently contested issues connecting the fragment to die ideological activity of readers (or beholders) and to the feminine. Adapting Johnson's epitaph for Goldsmith, one may say that on the subject of the fragment there are few forms Harries does not treat and none she treats that she does not adorn. Harries begins by questioning the special status accorded the romantic fragment in English and German literature and disputing the common association of the fragment with failed transcendental goals or modem solipsistic anxieties. What interests her is the planned or deliberate fragment ("Kubla Khan," in her view, as opposed to Hyperion), and for this she finds a literary genealogy in the eighteenüi century, not primarily in Ossian or the works of the Rowley poet, but in die fragmented fictions of Sterne and Mackenzie, Diderot and Goethe. Steme has a particular—indeed paradigmatic—importance in the argument both as the continuator of strategic deployments of the fragment in such writers as Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift, and as a major influence on the Fragmentenflut of the later eighteenth century, as well as on such romantic works as Biographia Literaria. In chapter 1, Harries is especially interested in the convention of the "manuscript fiction"—the authorial pose mat a narrative is dependent on adventitiously discovered material whose damaged or imperfect state endangers its coherence and completion. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 1, October 1996 104 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:1 Thus, Gargantua's genealogy has been nibbled by rats and cockroaches; Quixote's sword battle with the Basque ends abruptly when the manuscript on which it was based runs out; and the hack's narrative in the Tale of a Tub, as the editor complains, is printed from a manuscript that is filled with hiatuses. Later manuscript fictions are, if anything, more contrived: Tristram's lost "remarks" in book 7 of Tristram Shandy finally appear as curling papers on me head of a chaise-vamper's wife, and the fragments and scattered chapters of The Man ofFeeling are what remain of a manuscript that a curate has used for gun wadding. Harries reads manuscript fictions as "part of a complex and comic relation to history, biblical and epic genealogy, and the act of story-telling itself (p. 21). Noting Cervantes' preoccupation with missing manuscripts, translation, and printing piracy, she proposes that "the paradoxes that multiply around Don Quixote's identity are also die paradoxes of writing in a world full of printed books, books that can be endlessly reduplicated, books that can never claim to be original or identify a credible origin" (p. 26). Good as she is on the found manuscript topos, I wish she had considered Scott in this regard. At the end of her study, rather than (or in addition to) turning to Coleridge's and Byron's fragmented works and poems, she could have considered the Waverley novels, whose prefaces, filled with found manuscripts ofdoubtful provenance and intermediary narrators of varying credibility, demonstrate Scott's complex ambivalence about the power of fiction to recover the historical past. The line runs back from Scott through Steme to Cervantes, but, regrettably, The Great Unknown remains The Great Unread. In chapter 2, Harries presents us with a Sterne decidedly different from the Steme described by Earl Wasserman in The Subtler Language (1959). Whereas, for Wasserman, the miscommunications of the...