|
The
Poetics of Fragmentation in Contemporary British and American Fiction Edited
by Vanessa Guignery and Wojciech Drag
Series in Literary Studies Wilmington: Vernon Press: 2019 Hardcover. xxx+222 p. ISBN 978-1622736164. $61
Reviewed by Béatrice Trotignon Université Paris Dauphine
Composed of 15
papers selected from an international conference on Fragmentary Writing held in
Poland in 2017, The Poetics of Fragmentation offers an overview of the
complex, varied, sometimes contradictory, character of fragmentation in British
and American works of fiction since the 1990s. The editors of
the volume, Vanessa Guignery (École Normale Supérieure, Lyon) and Wojciech Drag
(University of Wroclaw), provide an excellent introduction to the collection
outlining a clear and useful background to the definition and evolving use,
role and meaning of fragmentation through successive traditions and literary
movements, with for instance the shifts from the perfect, closed aphorism of
the French moralists, to the more open forms of German Romanticism reflecting
the idealized infinite and the indeterminate, or its association to a sense of
chaos with modernity's crisis of completeness, subject and meaning at a time of
economic, social and technological upheavals, or postmodernism's radical sense
of disconnection and contingency. They go over the possible distinctive
categories of fragmentary writing, as well as their most common
characteristics, such as “incompleteness, discontinuity and heterogeneity”, and
their potential for challenging the status quo. The introduction also
articulates the guiding question overhanging the whole volume, i.e. “whether contemporary forms of
literary fragmentation constitute a return to the modernist episteme or the
fragmented literature of exhaustion of the 1960s, mark a continuity with
postmodernist aesthetics or signal a deviation from past models and an attempt
to reflect today’s accelerated culture of social media and over-communication.” Though not a
panorama of contemporary fiction, the collection nevertheless manages to both sketch
a general map of fragmentary fiction (taxonomies of forms and genres in printed
or digital media, possible genealogies, legacies and ruptures, landmark critical
works and so on), and make space for in-depth analyses of the works of some
prominent figures such as J.G. Ballard, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Julian
Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, David Markson, David Shields, David Foster Wallace,
Jonathan Safran Foer, Suzanne Treister or Thomas Ligotti. The names of many
others who contributed to fragmentary forms crop up through the collection,
giving a good idea of the vitality of fragmentary formats and a reservoir of
titles for anyone interested in the landscape of British and American fiction
currently or in the past. The book is organized
into four parts, each comprising three to five chapters, that aim at ordering
the different types of approaches or materials that are broached in the
articles: Part One: Forms of fragmentation: past and present; Part Two: The
fragment and the whole; Part Three: Fragmentation in the age of crisis and Part
Four: Multimodal and multimedial fragments. This does not preclude fruitful
echoes and complementarity between the chapters across the different parts, as
for instance with the three categories of fragmentation delineated by Merritt
Moseley in the opening chapter “What is fragmentary fiction?”: the braid, the
bricolage and the mosaic. The motif of the “mosaic” reappears in David Malcom's
analysis of short stories; in Marcin Terszewski's description of J. G.
Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition as “a mosaic picture of modern culture”
or in Alicia J. Rouverol's close reading of Ali Smith's Hotel World,
emphasizing its use of a “braided structure” and “non-linear narrative excerpts
juxtaposed in mosaic form”. There are other echoes across the volume, to list
just a few: the definition of the novel (chapters 1, 9, 12), and the renewal of
its form (chapters 5, 9, 12, 14) as it becomes a (sometimes unbound) object
(chapters 1, 2, 12, 14); the impact of modern technology (chapters 1, 2, 9, 12,
13, 14); the relation of fragmentation to (alternative) realism or mimetism
(chapters 1, 2, 5, 9, 10), the fiction and
non-fiction divide (chapters 7, 9), cut-ups (chapters 1, 6), rhetorical
strategies like juxtaposition and parataxis (chapters 2, 8, 9); the reshaping
of the reading experience (chapters 2, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14); haptics (chapters
12, 14), cinematic and filmic poetics (chapters 1, 4, 7, 8) or the specific
reference to poetry (chapters 4, 8, 9). These simple examples showcase how the
reader of the volume would certainly miss out the complementary and complex
ways of studying fragmentation and its impacts if s/he read only a section or
an isolated chapter. For this very reason, the absence of an index of selected
key notions is the major shortcoming of the collection, all the more so as the
chapters are not supplemented with an abstract or a list of key terms. This
lack is partially compensated for by the introduction which mentions some of
the main arguments of each chapter, draws possible links or divergences between
them and sets a larger critical background. The other useful and original addition
that partly makes up for this lack of index is Chapter 16, « Fragments of
a postscript » by Alison Gibbons, who offers critical reflections on the
whole volume through nineteen textual fragments that often show possible echoes
or dissonances between the different chapters, and add further examples of
fragmentary writing and critical literature on the topic. Part One is
more particularly set on classifying or identifying types of fragmentation. The
first chapter, “What is fragmentary fiction?” by Merritt Moseley offers
tentative definitions of fragmentariness, after reminding there is no such
thing as absolute non-fragmentation in fiction. Works defined as fragmentary
nevertheless must feel fragmented, be made up of fragments and / or be
fragments in themselves. Moseley distinguishes fortuitous fragments (unfinished
and incomplete works) from intentionally fragmented fictions: the numerous
examples he summons range for the former category from the Epic of Gilgamesh
to David Foster Wallace's The Pale King (2011), and for the latter from
works that are “strenuously different from a novel” as Nabokov's Pale Fire
(1962), to those “operating under the conventions of film” as Evelyn Waugh's Vile
Bodies (1930) or such works that might be said to be “militantly
fragmentary” as B.S. Johnson's unbound book in a box The Unfortunates
(1969), J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition favoring free association
to capture the mind's randomness, or William S. Burrough's cut-ups combining
randomness and intervention. Moseley then proceeds to delineate three
categories that do not exhaustively cover the whole of fragmentary fiction, but
echo a feature shared by more recent works that, as Moseley argues quoting Ted
Gioia's words in “The Rise of the Fragmented Novel” (2013), “are holistic and
coalescent,” resisting “disunity,” unlike the postmodernists who relied on
fragmentation as a means of disjunction and dissolution. These three practices
are the braid (“a series of distinct narrative projects which are interspersed
with one another rather than offered in sequence), the bricolage (“works which
are composed out of radically heterogeneous materials”) and the mosaic (“texts
consisting of many narratives that are complete in themselves”), illustrated by
three novels on the 2016 shortlist for the Man Booker Prize: Madeleine Thien's Do
Not Say We Have Nothing, Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project
and David Szalay's All That Man Is. Though Moseley puts his three
categories under the aegis of Ted Gioia to characterize recent fiction, it is
not clear by the end of his chapter whether he does hold them as really
distinctive of 21st-century fragmentary fiction for he lists many 20th-century
works of fiction to fully illustrate them too. But his mapping gives the reader
a wealth of relevant examples and scans a great number of guises adopted by
fragmentary fiction. The second
chapter by Mariano D'Ambrosio examines yet another possible subcategory in
fragmentary writing in the 21st century, that of polyphonic narratives, characterized
by non-linearity and multiplicity on all levels: voices, narrators, textual
fragments and typographical devices reshaping the reading experience. D'Ambrosio
more particularly focuses his attention on composition, through the notion of
liberature, introduced in 1999 by Polish author Zenon Fajfer and further
developed by Katarzyna Bazarnik, to refer to “the organic bond between a text
and its material book form,” making for self-reflexive novels adopting spatial
forms or architectural structures. The article proceeds to focus on several
polyphonic novels as House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski), The
People of Paper (Salvador Plascencia, 2006), The Body (Jenny Boully,
2002), S (Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams, 2013) and The Absent Therapist
(Will Eaves, 2014). While he clearly ties them to a long line of literary
experimentation (Sterne, Borges, Nabokov) through multiple precise examples and
close analysis of their structures, D'Ambrosio's statement about House of
Leaves addressing “the impossibility to establish authenticity in the
digital world” remains somewhat insufficiently illustrated. But on the whole he
makes a clear case on the way these 21st-century fictions carry on “the
Sternean and Scriblerian traditions,” embracing fragmentary polyphony and the
materiality of the page “to grasp the globalized, fractured, plural world we
live in”. The third
chapter by David Malcom examines the short-story's associations with
brevity and fragmentariness and maps the various strategies used by writers,
editors and publishers to “augment” it, whether through epiphany and epiklesis,
expansion into compressed novels or the compilation of collections. After drawing
a typology of collections, Malcom examines two collections of short fictions,
Alan Garner's The Stone Book Quartet (1979) and Lydia Davis's Break
it Down (1986), and analyses the ways fragmentariness is counterbalanced by
coherence through narrative technique, linguistic patterns and underlying
homogeneity of characters or settings. This comes as
an apt transition for Part Two, the five chapters of which tackle the
complex relation between the fragment and the whole, each of them focusing on
one author (J.G. Ballard, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Julian Barnes and
Jeannette Winterson). What better motif than that of the ruin to start off such
a section with chapter four, in which Marcin Tereszewski analyzes the
architectural fragment in J.G. Ballard's fiction, addressing “the relationship
of the fragment as ruination to the concept of totality,” towards
“distinguishing the contemporary fragment from its Romantic predecessor,”
Calling on Maurice Blanchot's conception of fragmentation as a dynamic and
poetic energy, Tereszewski focuses on J.G. Ballard's most explicit foray into
experimental writing with The Atrocity Exhibition and explores the
conflicted interpretation of fragments seen in turn as a nostalgic expression
of the loss of a perfect whole, or as a celebration of liberation from an
imposed totality, in order to stress Ballard's combination of both aspects. In
his earlier catastrophe novels, the ruins can be seen “a reminder of an
irretrievable past,” while in his later urban novels his representation of
ruins “bring him closer to the transgressive element of the Gothic tradition”
as is further illustrated in the analysis of Empire of the Sun, in which
the totality appears as a construct, an illusion of a whole that was never real
and that must be overturned. Ballard breaks from Romanticism and presents the
ruin, not to express the infinite, but to “undercut the false image of totality
imposed by nations, history or culture.” The whole is
yet again not something to be nostalgically mourned for in chapter five
with Gerd Bayer's analysis of David Mitchell's use of fragmentation subsumed
into or supplemented by a transtextuality that signals toward connection and
timelessness by resolving mutually incompatible notions of fragmentation (signaling
both towards “a lost wholeness and an as-yet unattained complexity”).
Transtextuality is the means by which Mitchell replaces “the limitations of the
individual book with the communication that ensues when various books relate to
each other,” in a sort of rhizome by which the book becomes a mere crossroads “for
an elusive book-to-come.” This
optimistic outlook on fragmentation might, at first, not be seen compatible
with Ali Smith's novel Hotel World (2001), whose fragmentary writing in
relation to globalization, as argued by Alicia J. Rouverol in chapter six,
can be construed as a criticism of late capitalism. However, after a careful and
convincing analysis of the fragmentary in structures (braided narratives,
typographic gaps), non-linear narratives (questionnaires, clips, mosaic
chapters) and language (fragments, elided letters) underlying the negative
experience of globalization and the supermodern, Rouverol shows that the
fragmentary (gaps, elision, communal narration) also expresses connectivity and
cohesiveness of community, humanizing the non-places of the supermodern. In chapter seven,
Teresa Brus examines the relation of the fragment to the whole in terms of
attraction and dispersion through the hybridity developed by Julian Barnes in
his life-stories fusing “quintessentially essayistic impulses with the exacting
framework of the short story”. Reading Levels of Life (2013), Brus describes
its essay-story-memoir composite form, making for the interpenetration of
“fragments of Nadar's singular experience” (his love life, his combination of aeronautics
and photography) with Barnes' own “struggle with fractured life” after losing
his wife. His interest in composite auto/biographical modes of writing, mixing
fiction and non-fiction, stems from the tension between biographical details,
anecdotes and resonant fragments with the overarching sense of finality brought
by death, with many of his short stories in Cross Channel (1996), The
Lemon Table (2004) and Pulse (2011) populated “by the elderly with a
strong sense of an ending.” Fragments of memory, broken melodies, bits of
history are “agents of delaying closure-referencing.” Maria
Antonietta Struzziero's careful close reading of Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap
of Time in chapter eight offers a very detailed and convincing analysis
of her stylistic choice of fragmentary writing, showing how it looks for a form
of coherence and unity, with images of ruin, loss and death turned into a story
of recovery and reunion. Fragmentation in the novel is inherently linked to
intertextuality, with a re-appropriation and transformation of Shakespeare's The
Winter's Tale, so much so that the novel turns into a fragment or “part of
a distant whole to which it is related while being irreversibly separated from
it.” It bears “the marks of a fragmentary mode that is articulated on the
threshold between obedience to, and disruption of, the authority of
Shakespeare's play.” There is a constant foregrounding of fragmentation,
ranging from a collage effect of often juxtaposed palimpsestic quotations to a
labyrinthine, polyphonic narrative “with multiple border-crossings of time,
space and gender.” Disruptions of narrative linearity, frequent use of analepses,
different typefaces make for structural fragmentation of the novel, while the
rhetoric of the text shows stylistic fragmentation in sentence and paragraph
breaks, syntactic dislocation and truncation, abnormally emphatic style of
punctuation, irregular page layout, filmic montage techniques, rhythmic
phrasing reaching the “incantatory intensity of poetry.” Digital forms
reflecting the contemporary world are also drawn upon, mimicking “the
postmodern aesthetics of the mash-up”. The ultimate goal is to “make it new”
and subvert the original framework and make room for a counter-narrative that
celebrates plurality. Part Three
picks up this notion of renewal through appropriation and fragmentation in chapter
nine with Wojciech Drag's careful focus on collage manifestos, as driving
forces for projects of the future with the discarding of conventional forms in David
Markson’s This is Not a Novel (2010) and David Shields’s Reality
Hunger (2011). The fiction and non-fiction divide is obliterated by both
authors, who also favor compilations of “short, often elliptical statements set
apart by empty spaces.” Drag provides in-depth exploration of structures,
collage forms, strategies of appropriation or plagiarism and fragmentation at
work in both (anti-)novels, and their impact of the reading experience, pushing
the reader to become a virtual co-author of its meaning. Collage as a technique
invented by the Cubists is reinvested in 21st-century literature to represent both
the age's own experience of crisis and “the phenomenal experience of everyday
life, marked by fragmentation, overproduction and media saturation.” Another author
seen as renewing the tools of experimental fiction through fragmentation is
David Foster Wallace whose fiction is closely studied in chapter ten by Jaroslaw
Hetman who argues that the writer uses the sense of brokenness typical of
postmodernist fiction of the 1960s and 1970s with a different aim, so as to
alleviate loneliness, oppose solipsism and bring together toward a neo-Platonic
sense of possible transcendence. Arguing for “an aesthetic of fragmentation
counterbalanced by the ethics of harmonious transcendence”, Hetman identifies
three main types of fragmentation in Wallace's writing: brokenness as a mimetic
technique echoing the compulsive repetition of addiction, which is subsumed in
a mathematical organizing principle (a fractal), as illustrated by Infinite
Jest; fragmentation as “a reflection on the solipsistic disconnection
haunting post-capitalist societies,” in which a specific use and vision of
language nevertheless allows for achieving some form of contact between human
beings in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999); the unintended
fragmentation of The Pale King (2011) resulting from Wallace's untimely
death, counterbalanced by the relationship the author managed to forge with his
readers. In chapter
11, after establishing a specific theoretical psychoanalytical framework
for analyzing trauma, Caroline Magnin links it to the mechanics of fragmentation in
the narration of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) by Jonathan
Safran Foer. Ellipsis and excess, amnesia and hypermnesia, silence and
logorrhea are the literary translations of the clinical phenomena of trauma and
characterize the unstable fragmentary narrative in the novel. Inserted images
also work as fragmenting devices evoking the sudden breaches specific to trauma,
which the narration will attempt to stitch back together. Images of
multiplicity abound, whether in the three narrative strands that remain unconnected
despite the links between their respective narrators, or in the recurring
motifs of the double and rhyming events, also typical of literary translations
of trauma. The phenomenon of latency, heightening the disjunctive narrative,
makes for deferred explanations or retrospective revelations. But fragmentation
also enables escaping from authoritative, fixed meanings and provides creative
tools for expression and interpretation, whether through the use of
photographs, or coded and atomized messages that await deciphering. The renewal of
the novel and fiction in general is brought further in Part Four, with
the focus on multimodality and multimediality, as literature pushes across the
frontier of its traditional means, transgressing media boundaries and appropriating
varied semiotic systems, such as digital media or music. In chapter twelve
Grzegorz Maziarczyk comments on the impact of electronic means of information
storage and dissemination, and studies several instances of fragmentation, in
both print and digital forms. The novel, characterized by an inherent generic
instability, cannot be considered as purely verbal with its use of devices of
fragmentation that are materially and visually signaled and with its
appropriation of “the affordances of other media.” The recent engagement in
“the aesthetic of bookishness” intensifies the print tradition or imitates
electronic textuality. The visual fragmentation at work (changing typeface,
“verbo-visual” merging, unbound novels) is illustrated though the works of
Graham Rawle, Mark Z. Danielewski, Steve Tomasula, B.S. Johnson, Marc Saporta,
Abrams and Dorst. As for creators of digital fiction, some foreground “the
medial singularity of the digital” that cannot transfer to print. They exploit
the haptic engagement specific to the medium, like the touchscreen, the
pinching and spreading gestures, the use of online resources. They favor more
linear organization than past classics of electronic literature, and push
fragmentation on the level of the interface by the “multimodal co-deployment of
various semiotic resources”, sometimes leading to the temporal fragmentation of
the act of reading (as in The Pickle Index by Eli Horowitz and Russell
Quinn, 2015), the fragmentation of space (Entrances & Exits by Reif
Larsen using Google Street View, 2016), the combination of fragmented sentences
and fragmented indeterminate cognitive data (Pry by Danny Cannizzaro and
Samantha Gorman, 2015). Others elect media convergence, in which the novel is
expanded through transmediality (websites, iTunes podcasts, twitter accounts or
tumblr blogs for characters) as in S (Abrams and Dorst), The Raw Shark
Texts (Steven Hall, 2007), Night Film (Marisha Pessl, 2013). In extreme
transmediality, the novel would become “only an element of a larger project
designed to create a fragmentary, multi-faceted and multi-media representation
of a particular fictional universe.” Another example
of multimodality is explored in chapter 13 by Zofia Kolbuszewska in her
superb, in-depth analysis of Hexen 2.0 by Suzanne Treister, who is active
in the field of the digital and new media and web art, combining art, science
and technology. Her artistic project, assembling fragments, combine a Tarot
cards pack, two exhibitions and an album, the latter being composed of an essay,
historical diagrams, alchemical charts, cognitive maps linked to the 1946-1953
Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. By interrogating “links between the occult,
the scientific research on communication and the workings of the human mind, as
well as the military's investment in new technologies,” she invites one to
uncover suppressed knowledge and unacknowledged connections, using visual set
ups in relation to Memory Theaters and cabinets of curiosities and providing an
archeology of knowledge. As such she leads and exploration of the
epistemological dimension of fragmentation, as well as the role of
incompleteness and fragmentation, feedback loops and autopoetic systems in
communication. In chapter
14, Côme Martin focuses on shuffle narratives in texts, comics and digital
formats. Through eleven examples, he maps out a comprehensive overview of this “anti-form”
in which chance plays a role in the ordering (and even discarding) of their segments.
The media that are imitated range from “card games to the oracle to the puzzle.”
He notes a resurgence of this experimental approach, which could be accounted
for by the ease with which the digital produces computer-programmed chance.
Shuffle narratives have an impact on the reading experience, inducing an
element of co-authorship as well as haptic engagement, while their
fragmentation leads them to explore themes “like fragmented memory, the
reconstruction of the past, and painful and sometimes traumatic experiences,” or
“the cognitive model of remembering and associating thought.” Structurally, they
embody rhizomes, through their refusal of linear narratives, their questioning
of the notion of beginnings and endings, and their potential infinity. Chapter
fifteen is the volume's final examination of a multimodal practice built on fragmentation (both
thematically and structurally) with Deborah Bridle's description of the
literary and musical collaboration between Thomas Ligotti and Current 93 for In
a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land (1997), which combines four short stories
with an experimental musical soundscape of four tracks, one for each story.
Resonance and dissonance are the two main ways the text and the music interact
to create a whole.
Cercles © 2020 All rights are reserved and no reproduction from this site for whatever purpose is permitted without the permission of the copyright owner. Please contact us before using any material on this website.
|
|
|
