The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre (review)

A response, not a review

What is a review?

How can we respond when asked to do the impossible:

to look again, for the first time?

Experiment, I suppose, fragmentarily.

Introductory Paragraph

In this complex analysis of the genre of the fragment, Camelia Elias shows us that while there is no such thing as a fragment in the singular, there are always already a plurality of fragments at work in the history (and divides) of literature, philosophy, and theology. Although we can never, not quite, be sure of what a fragment is—whether a piece of language is in fact to be classified as a fragment—we must nonetheless "assign the fragment a status of which one can never be sure" (2). I like this uncertainty. It fragmentizes things from the beginning, but also lays the groundwork for the labor of making connections of fragments across time and significances. Mythoplokos, Anne Carson calls it, citing Sappho from the Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta. Weaving fictions. Elias weaves her textual fragments across the page of history.

Summary I

Moving from the pre-Socratics through the German Romantics, Elias proceeds to read Bénabou, Stein, Stern, Shakespeare, Blanchot, Jabès, Taylor, and Markson, among others, as she develops a typology of ten types of fragments. The first group, which focuses on "agency," includes what she calls the Coercive Fragment, the Consensual Fragment, the Redundant, Repetitive, and Resolute Fragment. The second group, which focuses to a greater extent on representation, includes the Ekphrastic Fragment; the Epigrammatic, Epigraphic, and Emblematic Fragment; and the Epitaphic Fragment. The first section, which is a presentation of the history of the fragment, offers a kind of latent performativity, while the second set—the fragments of postmodernity—exhibit a more active, manifest performativity. Taxonomies, for me, are soporific; I simply can't follow them. I can barely count, and the gene for grids was spliced out of my ancestry at someunidentified point in the history of primates. So my eyelids become heavy and my head nods when I have to keep up with lists. Thank goodness Elias is such an intelligent writer, such a fine reader. She keeps me moving, keeps me bright-eyed as I leaf through the taxonomy of types.

Toward the end of The Fragment, Elias mentions that "the assumption that guides...