The Ubiquitous Fragment: Questions about Form

A major conceptual challenge to our understanding of the novel fragment as a literary genre is the traditional quantitative definition of the novel.  The novel is “sustained,” “considerable,” “long,” “extensive,” and so on, a view reinforced by a sequence of subgenres that move ever farther from the novel as they are shortened: novella, novelette, short story, and anecdote.  It is perhaps the vestigial force of turn-of-the-century short-story theory, with its emphasis on the “single impression,” that gives the impression that quantity signals quality.  And if the short story is not a reduced novel but its own kind of form with a different aesthetic, the shorter fragmentary forms--historiettes, anecdotes, and the like--must be of a different species as well, like those small birds found near the hippopotamus.

But there are many reasons to take the novelistic fragment seriously, beginning with the prevalence, elevation, and exploration of the fragment in eighteenth-century novels.  To name just a few of the significant sentimental examples: Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) and its numerous imitators, like William Combe’s Philosopher in Bristol (1775) or Susanna Rowson’s three-volume The Inquisitor (1788),  Henry Mackenzie’s A Man of Feeling (1771), Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and Louis-Sébastien de Mercier’s Tableau de Paris (1781-88) and Mon Bonnet de Nuit (1784), the latter among the most popular works of French literature in the postrevolutionary US.

In these works, the fragment is the basic element of the whole, something of a tableau with a small narrative and emotional arc, characterized by a dominant sensation that is emphatically periodized (in the older sense of that word) by fragmentation.  Thus the opening pages of A Sentimental Journey trace what we would consider an episode so small as to hardly warrant a chapter in a plot-driven novel--Yorick tries to arrange for a carriage, and encounters a begging friar and a mysterious woman--but this simple episode is itself fragmented into a dozen or more small scenes that foreground the tremendous range of A Sentimental Journey’s emotional palette.  The same could be said of many of the other examples cited above--the fragment is not buried beneath the massiveness of the novel, but

rather marks the constitutive boundary of the novel, its molecular point of intelligibility.

For that reason, at least one strain of sentimental novel arguably uses the novel’s long form as a means of highlighting the fragmentary or mutable quality of experience: that is, the long form exists not to provide cohesion but to emphasize variability and change, or perhaps even more interestingly, the repetition inherent in variations on a theme.  (In the latter case, I’m thinking of a fragment sequence reprinted from Combe’s The Philosopher in Bristol, exploring the encounter with dramatically sudden deaths.)  In such a work, the intentional fragment emerges as the dominant entity, since portions of the novelistic whole can be shaved off (as in the missing chapters of Mackenzie’s work, used as rifle wadding) without much loss, or, conversely, fragments can be added indefinitely, as the experiential complexity of the novelistic scenario can never be exhausted (think of Mercier’s Paris).  The fragment here is not an excerpt but a very different organizing principle of the novel; the novel is the call to extrapolate, or the model of fragmentary application.  If one finds imitations of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey throughout the press, one could say that individuals are envisioning their sentimentalized moments as part of some larger novelistic whole.

If this is the case, we need multiple definitions of the novel--it is in part the long prose form, but it is also the long prose principle or imperative evoked, like an archaeological object, by its shards.  Our tally of novels would somehow have to take into account the proliferation of embryonic novels everywhere--at the very least dotting newspapers and magazines as indices of novelistic potential.  The fragment signals the ubiquity of the novel, which like an oak tree has littered the publishing landscape with its acorns, but it also, to use a favorite 18C term, bespeaks the “futurity” of the novel, its extendability, its accessibility to all readers.  Hence the proliferation of “Maria” fragments, inspired by A Sentimental Journey’s reworking of Tristram Shandy’s Maria episode; just as pictorial renditions of Maria accumulated, so periodical writers and readers attempted or sought out reworkings.

But this view--the fragment signals potential novels everywhere--could be countered with a competing formulation.  Elizabeth Wanning Harries (in The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century) suggests an interesting lineage for the fragment from (among other possibilities) Petrarch to Roland Barthes.  Petrarch’s sonnet series was given the Latin title Rerum vulgarium fragmenta--Fragments of vernacular poetry--and understood its presentation of Laura and the narrator’s love relationship as fragmentary.  The sonnets capture “momentary states” absent the “connective tissue” that would typically bind a proper narrative, and what’s more, the sequence foregrounds imagery and terminology of “scattering” (14).  In an important sense, the series eschews notions of narrative progression, consistent poetic identity, and meaningful transitive interactions (17-19).  Even the sequence of 365 fragments appears less as a coherent boundary of intelligibility and development and more of an arbitrary constraint or, better yet, an exercise of daily contribution.  Roland Barthes would make this insight central to A Lover’s Discourse, suggesting that a useful reading of the messiness of love discourse would be to acknowledge the weak indexing of its components under the fairly empty rubric of (positive, happy) “love,” when in actuality the lover’s discourse is inherently fragmentary, noncumulative, and nonprogressive. Harries cites this useful passage:

In linguistic terms, one might say that the figures are distributional but not integrative; they always remain on the same level: the lover speaks in bundles of sentences but does not integrate these sentences on a higher level, into a work; his is a horizontal discourse: no transcendance, no deliverance, no novel (though a great deal of the fictive). (Barthes 7 qtd on Harries 18, emphasis added)

Barthes' privileged example of fragmentary love discourse, it's worth remembering, is Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, a fragmentary text firmly on the perimeter of the sentimental mode, and what he describes here, to draw on his earlier structuralist terminology, are literary episodes ununited by some integrative indexing.  Barthes played with this idea again in a 1977 lecture series How to Live Together, in which he described “figures” that might serve as resources for us today.  What he’s describing is a particular rendition of what the 18C would have called a commonplace book, an open-ended collection of fragments capturing different interests, ideals, axioms, and scenes collected by one or several readers.

While Barthes insisted that he was describing something “fictive” but not a novel, it would be more accurate to say he was drawn to the fragmentary novel tradition evoked here, and was thus offering a way of thinking about 18C fragmentary production: communities of readers actively or passively participating in the horizontal discourse of sentiment--unconcerned with the sociological links that might correspond to integrative connectiveness, but rather concerned with the crafting of distinct tableaux of emotional complexity that might have some modular usefulness for others.

If I suggested earlier that fragmentary production might signal germinating novels throughout a literary culture, this alternative framing suggests the collective production of a massive, incomplete, on-going, social novel.  Whichever way we view it, the fragment inevitably extends our sense of the novel’s hegemony in early US culture.
  
Ed White, Tulane University, ewhite9@tulane.edu