Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  the

  This is actually a good illustration of the importance of a title in a short work, where it may do half the work, or even more: it prepares us for the text or body of the poem. Without the title, in this case, we would have only the word the. We would be left bewildered. As it is, the title here tells us that the poem is an homage to someone whose name we may or may not recognize. Campbell goes on to say: “It helps to know that Louis Zukofsky [1904–1978] is the author of the book-length poem ‘A.’)” If we know this, and have even read some of “A” (an 826-page poem in twenty-four sections, written over about fifty years), only then can we appreciate the wit of Morgan’s poem. (One section of “A,” by the way, is only four words long.)

  Morgan may also have had in mind a poem of Zukofsky’s that he wrote at age twenty-two and that is regarded as his first major work. It is called “Poem Beginning ‘The’” and is seen as a partly satirical response to his predecessors in the poetry world and in particular to T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The poem much impressed Ezra Pound.

  Edwin Morgan’s “Homage to Zukofsky” certainly brings up once again a question that is regularly raised: How much does a reader have to know beforehand, in order to receive the full impact of a piece of writing, and is it all right for a reader not to receive that full impact? I had to pose myself that question, though I was not troubled by it, in the case of my short piece called “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant.” The full body of the story is “that Scotland has so few trees.” I think the story works even if you do not know who Samuel Johnson is, though it has more impact if you do.

  In the case of Morgan’s poem, perhaps a reader needs to know several things beforehand in order to get anything at all out of it. But I don’t believe that this should stop Morgan from writing the poem exactly as it is, as he thinks best, and I don’t believe that he needs to provide a footnote. Any piece of writing, after all, has only a particular, and limited, audience or readership. It is not necessary to try to appeal to everyone, or even to explain oneself.

  2013

  Fragmentary or Unfinished:

  Barthes, Joubert, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Flaubert

  A cooperative …

  From Roland Barthes’s introduction to A Lover’s Discourse, in Richard Howard’s translation: “What we have been able to say below about waiting, anxiety, memory is no more than a modest supplement offered to the reader to be made free with, to be added to, subtracted from, and passed on to others … (Ideally, the book would be a cooperative.)”

  Of course, any book, and any piece of writing, is already part of a cooperative. It is, in itself as printed on the page, incomplete. It requires a reader to complete it. But the reader may also misunderstand it, distort it in favor of another idea, forget large parts of it, misremember it, create something different in misremembering it, etc. All these responses are perfectly legitimate parts of the cooperative act.

  What is missing but is still present as empty space

  In Peter Handke’s novel Across, the narrator, an archaeologist who eventually concentrates his investigations on thresholds, is criticized early in his career because, as he is told, all he cares about is finding something. He goes on to say, in Ralph Manheim’s translation, “It was in part this remark that impelled me to train myself at digs to look less for what was there than for what was missing, for what had vanished irretrievably—whether carried or merely rotted away—but was still present as a vacuum, as empty space or empty form.”

  The fragment

  I would like to take the idea of the fragment as a form of writing and examine, explore, and digress from it, to consider ideas of wholeness, completion, incompletion, order, the writer’s notebook, and certain writers who interest me in the ways their work relates to ideas of the fragmentary and the complete, like Joseph Joubert, writing 150 to 200 years ago, who resisted compiling collections of Pensées of the sort he was encouraged to produce by friends like François-René de Chateaubriand, and who planned and attempted various publishable “works” but left behind only notebooks of fragments or fragmentary entries, selections from which are now regarded as works; Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet whose late hymns and fragments were written in the early decades of the nineteenth century during a period when he lived in seclusion in a tower in Tübingen, apparently mad; Stéphane Mallarmé, fifty years or so after that, attempting poems during the time his eight-year-old son, Anatole, was dying and then dead; Barthes, who admits to a preference for the fragment, for writing in “brief bursts,” as he calls them; and others.

  Ruin as construction

  Here are some thoughts by Eugène Delacroix, on the power of the unfinished:

  A building which is going up and where the details are not yet indicated gives one an impression that is different from what one gets from the same building when it has received its complement of ornamentation and finish. The same is true of a ruin, which is the more striking because of the lost parts. Its details are effaced or mutilated, just as in the building that is going up one does not yet see more than the rudiments and the vague indication of moldings and of the ornamented parts. The finished building encloses the imagination within a circle and forbids it to go beyond that. Perhaps the sketch of a work gives so much pleasure just because each one finishes it to his liking (The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, tr. Walter Pach, Grove Press [Evergreen Edition], New York, 1961).

  Question: Why does this ruin appear all the more impressive?

  Are the fragments I am considering, and other fragments, what remain (i.e., akin to the ruin) or what are still under construction? Or are they both at once—fragments left from what is still under construction?

  (It may be added that Delacroix’s writings themselves, of which we have a considerable quantity, remained fragmentary, scattered through letters and journals, although he made a start at writing a dictionary of the arts and of painting.)

  Characterizing fragment

  To characterize the fragmentary piece of writing is not easy: in the case of each writer who seems to me to write something like a fragment, the qualities would be a little different, so that there are more particular definitions than general definitions, though one can sometimes find at least a few common elements, pieces of a more general definition.

  Hölderlin: The fragment can be the extreme form of what he was doing already in his late poetry, whose outstanding feature, says Richard Sieburth in his introduction to his translation of Hymns and Fragments, was defined by Theodor Adorno as “parataxis, that is, the juxtaposition, without explanatory connectives, of various syntactical and grammatical elements (as opposed to hypotaxis, the subordination or coordination of phrase or clause).”

  (What I have written has come out, is presented, in what Barthes would think of as a horizontal structure—equal increments—rather than as a hierarchical structure, in which the parts are subordinated to an ultimate governing point or meaning. It is more paratactic than hypotactic.)

  In the case of Barthes, a fragment is a “brief burst” or a “beginning.” Speaking of himself in the third person, he comments, “Liking to find, to write beginnings, he tends to multiply this pleasure: that is why he writes fragments: so many fragments, so many beginnings, so many pleasures (but he doesn’t like the ends: the risk of the rhetorical clausule is too great: the fear of not being able to resist the last word)” (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, tr. Richard Howard).

  Joubert’s fragments were, perhaps, in part, a way of being perfectly clear: “Everything that is exact is short … because what is isolated can be seen better”; or “What is clear should not be drawn out too much. These useless explanations, these endless examinations are a kind of long whiteness and lead to boredom. It is the uniformity of a wall, a long piece of laundry” (The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, tr. Paul Auster).

  How Joubert describes thoughts in a book

  “August 1 (insomni nocte). I would like thoughts to succeed one another in a book like stars in the sky, with order,
with harmony, but effortlessly and at intervals, without touching, without mingling.”

  Notes

  For Mallarmé, they are notes. He calls them, in a letter to Robert de Montesquiou written as Mallarmé’s child was dying, “a few rapid notes,” notes for an impossible work. “Hugo,” he writes, “was happy to have been able to speak (about the death of his daughter); for me, it’s impossible” (A Tomb for Anatole, tr. Paul Auster).

  A more general definition—what I finally see that I mean when I think of the fragment, old or new—is a text that works with silence, ellipsis, abbreviation, suggesting that something is missing, but that has the effect of a complete experience.

  How Barthes describes the fragment

  “The fragment is like the musical idea of a song cycle…: each piece is self-sufficient, and yet it is never anything but the interstice of its neighbors: the work consists of no more than an inset, an hors-texte.… What is the meaning of a pure series of interruptions?” And further: “The fragment has its ideal: a high condensation, not of thought, or of vision, or of truth … but of music: ‘development’ would be countered by ‘tone’ … here it is timbre which should reign” (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes).

  How Joubert describes thoughts following one another

  Joubert also looks to music for a simile: “Thoughts must follow one another and be connected to one another like sounds in music, through their relationships alone—harmony—and not like links in a chain” (Notebooks).

  Maurice Blanchot, in his essay “Joubert and Space” (tr. Lydia Davis), which is included as an afterword in the North Point Press edition of Joubert’s Notebooks, comments on Joubert’s comparison of himself to an aeolian harp:

  The Notebooks accumulated images through which he tried to reconcile himself to his difficulties: “I confess that I am like an aeolian harp—which gives off some beautiful sounds but can play no songs.” “I am an aeolian harp. No wind has passed through me.” The aeolian harp: it is as though space itself has become instrument and music—an instrument with all the extent and continuity of open space, but music composed of sounds that are always discontinuous, disjointed, and unfettered. Elsewhere, he explains the gaps in his meditation and the white spaces that interrupt his phrases by the tension he must maintain in his strings so as to resonate properly, by the slackening that results from this harmony and by the long period of time he needs to “recover his strength and tighten himself again.”

  Fragment and whole

  The word fragment implies the word whole. A fragment would seem to be a part of a whole, a broken-off part of a whole. Does it also imply, as with other broken-off pieces, that enough of them would make a whole, or remake some original whole, some ideal whole? Fragment, as in ruin, may also imply something left behind from a past original whole. In the case of Hölderlin’s Fragments, they are the only parts showing of a madman’s poems, the rest of which are hidden somewhere in his mind; or the only parts showing of a logical whole whose logic is unavailable to us, fragments that seem fragments only to us, while they seem to him to form a whole—for there is only a thin line between what is so new to us that it changes our way of thinking and what is so new to us that we can’t recognize it as a coherent thought or piece of writing, can’t see the connections the author sees, or even sense that they are there. Or fragments that seem to him to make a whole and to us, eventually, also to make a whole, though from a different angle.

  Or, as with Mallarmé’s fragmentary poems for his dead son, the fragment is something left from some projected whole, some future whole (i.e., fragments destined one day to be pieced together with other elements to make a whole); or the fragments of ideal poems shattered by grief; fragments comparable to the incoherent utterances of voiced grief; inarticulateness being in this case the most credible expression of grief: no more than a fragment could be uttered, so overwhelming was the unuttered whole. In the silences, the grief is alive.

  What is missing?

  We may call a piece of writing a fragment when something seems to be missing from it, when we feel it breaks off abruptly, or lacks some crucial element, does not develop where it might develop, or seems a part of something larger. But this depends on our expectations as readers.

  We can contemplate a Mayan ruin in the jungle, and consider it a whole thing, though it is only a fragment of something that was once whole. In our experience, it is a whole, though a Mayan who lived at the time when the entire temple was there as originally built, and who used it, would see it now as broken. It is a whole for us because it is all we have experienced of it, and because it yields us a complete experience. While we recognize that it is a ruin, and broken, for us nothing is missing.

  This is the case for the piece of writing that we recognize, historically or formally, as a fragment, but that is whole for us.

  The poet William Bronk, writing in his 1974 set of prose pieces, The New World, about one area of the Mayan jungle, has a different way of describing how we see:

  We are looking at what we see, which no description gave us, which never existed. What we see is new and if we mean to see it we must look at it as something new. What we see is not what is there, though surely something is there and we seem to see it.

  Making a work

  For the writer of a fragment intended as such, the fragment is complete and substantial, does not need more, and cannot make do with less. For some readers, also, this is true, but not for all readers. Therefore, in this case, as in others, it is the reader also making the work, seeing a work or not seeing a work, just as the writer—acting as reader, as receiver, of material—saw a work and wrote it so that, for her or him, it became a written work.

  We can see (i.e., read) fragments written two hundred years ago as complete works, though their authors did not write them to be complete works.

  We may read Joubert’s, Hölderlin’s, or Mallarmé’s fragments as works, whereas they did not intend them as works. Barthes, of a more modern age, intended his fragments to form a work; he recognized in them a legitimate or useful or comfortable form.

  How we see

  Here is Barthes describing his attempt to copy a Persian composition of the seventeenth century: “I copy and naively connect detail to detail; whence unexpected ‘conclusions’: the horseman’s leg turns out to be perched right on top of the horse’s breastplate, etc.” (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes). His copy of this picture is a faithful representation of the way he saw the picture, or at least one way he saw the picture (certainly of the process of his seeing and copying).

  We do not see wholes, we see fragments. We are accustomed to, and maybe need, the illusion of living among, and perceiving, wholes. We may need to think we see the other side of the lamp as well as this side, or that this side is all that exists (i.e., that this side is the whole of it).

  Any imposition of a particular order on the great random miscellany of possible subject matter contradicts or distorts another possible order. We could say that the more complete a piece of writing is—if in this case complete means more fully elaborated, more particular—the more limiting it is, the more it leaves out, and therefore the more partial it is. A densely filled, fully articulated novel by Henry James is also partial. Two works by Marguerite Duras, The Lover and The War, give the impression of being fragmentary because they are written in short sections that do not always, or immediately, seem to have obvious links; the sections add up to a large picture but one that seems incomplete because of the breaks or gaps between sections. Any complete picture is an illusion, however. A picture that seems less complete may seem less of an illusion, therefore paradoxically more realistic.

  How Barthes arrives at his form

  Barthes’s approach (form) in the fragmentary works (e.g., The Pleasure of the Text, A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes): He is inspired by certain texts, and conversations with friends, and friends’ accounts of other texts, and uses these as inspirations or goads in the evolution of his own
thoughts—which is what many readers and thinkers do. What he then does that is not as common is to allow this written, published work to reflect this process: here, in physically separated “entries,” he allows each inspiration to generate its own thought, in which the inspiration is absorbed and integrated into his reaction to it.

  Of course, Barthes’s reading is dictated by his interests—and I mean reading in two senses: what he chooses to read and how he chooses to read it, or interpret it (i.e., what he sees in it). His is a partial view, his own partial view.

  Arrangements of fragments (order)

  Barthes groups his fragments thematically into a book on love, or a book on himself. Within this book, created of thematically grouped fragments, he arranges the fragments in alphabetical order, or alphabetical order with departures, so as, he says of A Lover’s Discourse, “to discourage the temptation of meaning.”

  In a diary or journal, probably in most writers’ working notebooks, fragments are arranged not logically, not thematically—except from time to time, if a preoccupation continues or recurs over some days or weeks—but chronologically. As our minds also entertain a random, miscellaneous, repetitious series of thoughts that are linked not logically—most of the time, anyway—but associatively. Our journals, selections from our thoughts, are sometimes linked logically, sometimes associatively—if they are a close record of our thoughts, or if we are moved by reading one earlier entry to write an entry that follows from it—but their arrangement is above all chronological. Because our lives have a chronological arrangement. Our lives are in chronological order, if no other kind of order.