Romantic Fragments

306 TILOTTAMA RAJAN politics, to use a modern cliche, as well as the psychological sources and implications for social structure contained in the dialectic of dominance which is everywhere present and finds its ultimate expression in Les Liaisons dangereuses. In spite of these reservations Le Vice ala mode brings to the public a mass of information and afar from banal conclusion which should indeed provoke fruitful dialogue and a re-examination of our idees refues concerning the eighteenthcentury French novel. Romantic Fragments TILOTTAMA RAJAN Thomas McFarland. Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation Princeton: Princeton University Press 1981. xxxiv, 432. $30.00 cloth, $9.50 paper It has long been recognized that the Romantic period produced an unusual number of fragments or works which otherwise frustrate the sense of an ending. Not only were The Prelude and Biographia Literaria antechapels to endeavours that remained unattempted in prose or rhyme, but even so apparently systematic a writer as Blake left one of his major prophecies, The Four Zoas, unengraved, and produced in his early period works composed of dialeclical and mobile parts the syntheSiS of which is deliberately left outside the text. The last poems of Keats and Shelley are fragments and seem appropriate as such. An inquiry into the subject is therefore overdue, though recent books by Elinor Shaffer and Edward Kessler involve attempts in that direction. McFarland's book appears to have begun as an investigation of the larger problem of Romantic fragments, and despite its restriction to Wordsworth and Coleridge its wealth of reference to other literary and philosophical sources suggests that it still aims at a phenomenology and psychology of the fragmentary or 'diasparaclive' tendencies of which the two figures studied are exemplary. One regrets the frequent inclusion of material which in his earlier book Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition would have been given the status of excursus notes: a discussion of Wordsworth's politics, for instance, seems out of place in an analysis whose focus is not socia-cultural. To argue that the book embodies its own subject in its 'diasparactive' mode of argument seems more than a little ingenious. Nevertheless the areas considered are fruitful ones, and McFarland's book will initiate, even if it does not conclude, discussion of the subject. A more fundamental criticism has to do with the organization of the book, which syncretizes into a single theory of the fragment derived from a Platonized Christian existentialism the very diverse accounts of the genesis of fragments provided in individual chapters. The chapters are best conceived of as spokes on a wheel rather than as parts of a linear argument. They are approaches to aproblem: approaches whose very lack ofconsistency with each other suggests that the terminus of this inquiry should have been a taxonomy of UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 52, NUMBER ,3, SPRING 1983 0042-0247/83/°500-°306-0310$01.5°/0 \Q UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS ROMANTIC FRAGMENTS 307 fragments rather than the universal and ahistorical theory offered in the final chapter, whose title ('Second Landing Place') claims to present more than just one of the many modalities of fragmentation. Given the usual equation ofaesthetic legitimacy with structural wholeness or at least intentional disjunctiveness, McFarland's book is valuable both in suggesting the appropriateness of incomplete works within an aesthetics of process rather than products and in moving the problem of unity from an aesthetic to a philosophical plane. The chapters seem to fall into three categories: those which attribute fragmentation to psychobiographical circumstances, those which trace it to a shift in world-view and thus make the fragment an essentially Romantic form, and those which explain the fragment metaphysically as the expression of a gap between essence and existence which is exacerbated in the Romantic period. Perhaps the most awkward of these chapters, in terms of the aim of providing an apologetics for the fragment, are the ones on the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge and on the simultaneously crippling and productive effect of their anxieties about their literary output. McFarland tries to avoid the devaluation of an author's works implicit in fOCUSing on his life by arguing that neurotic anxiety is...