Why independent publishing will be a norm for future writers.
Or how the form of fragments requires new ways to think book production —
Offprint — 13/5/23
Tate Modern (McAulay Studio)
Fragment is neither a determined style nor failure, it's the form of that which is written.
Derrida, Writing and Difference
I will be mainly speaking about two things today, and how they relate: fragments, and independent publishing. I will try to show why, in the medium of writing, the form of fragments escape any literary category, being at the border of everything, included in nothing,—and why this very form, still considered experimental although it has a long history, requires a new way to think book production, independent publishing, and even challenges the definition of what is a writer.
It is quite arduous to define a fragment, and we will see more precisely why later. A note, a thought on paper is a fragment; a list is a fragment; a slogan is a fragment; a draft is a fragment; an extract of a text, of an archive is a fragment. One thing, though: it seems safe to assert that fragments are mostly written in prose. I mean: there are still poets who write verses today, as some visual artists still paint figurative paintings—but versification has disappeared for the most part, and there is no reason to be too romantic about it. Rhythm is not only about rhymes, and fragments, being a discontinuous form, also allow breaks.
But what is prose ? Everything—and nothing. Literature is prose, philosophy is prose, poetry is prose. As written pieces of or in prose, fragments are at the intersection of these three literary genres; an assertion I would like to prove.
Let’s start with philosophy: Heraclitus was writing fragments to convey his thought in Ancient Greece—but no thinker before Nietzsche, born in the 19th century, was able to continue this legacy, and build an oeuvre made of aphorisms*. The Gay science, his most personal book as he calls it, is made, besides a hundred poems, of a thousand aphorisms: they could be one line long, or multiple pages; most of them have titles— but they are all statements written in order to establish a new world.
An aphorism is not a proverb: it is not made to understand why we do things, but to give their meaning. True philosophy is very far away from the many self-help books we find on the shelves of any general bookstore. Aphorisms need to be read at least twice, says Nietzsche, in order to understand the secret motives of their composition; they must be interpreted—which means they involve the reader as an active, yet not completing part of the text.
We understand a piece of philosophy made of aphorisms is very different from the classical, linear essay that reigned over the history of philosophy since Plato. If Nietzsche is the most important thinker of our times, it is not only because he assassinated God, or erased morality, but also because the substance of his ideas was supported by a new form: the fragment.
Same goes for literature. Since the Middle Ages, we have one canonical format, and it is the novel. Once again, it is most of the time linear, with a beginning, a middle and an end. One could say that we reached the peak of this format with James Joyce; indeed, what’s left after Ulysses ? Not much, and this is why Samuel Beckett, who was a disciple of Joyce, started deconstructing the novel and writing short stories. Sometimes very short,—and he, along with Kafka, initiated the trend that we call today: micro-fiction. And what is micro-fiction if not a fragment with a narrative ? It is not the point here to assess whether a narrative is still valid in a contemporary paradigm of literature, or, following Wittgenstein, fiction only a grammatical thing —but what matters is that, once again, like in philosophy, a historical form has been replaced by a shorter, more scattered way to tell stories.
We can also refer to another piece, more precise although maybe lesser known: Tropisms—by Nathalie Sarraute. The book is made of twenty-four vignettes sketching, to use her words, "interior movements that precede and prepare our words and actions, at the limits of our consciousness”. Sartre, Genet and Duras—all call it a masterpiece—Tropisms is the entry of fragments in literature.
Last, but not least—poetry. In the 19th century, Baudelaire broke versification—and created the prose poem. Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Gertrude Stein continued this movement and wrote beautiful fragmented pieces of prose. The border between prose poem and short story, or prose fragment, is very narrow; actually, it’s even impossible to tell the difference. Some theoreticians may argue that narration draws the line: if the text tells a story, then it is literature; if not, it is poetry. Useless to say that this argument is not valid, as a story beautifully told (take Tale, a piece from Rimbaud), could be way more poetic than any ‘poem’. Poetry is not a genre—it’s a mode. It’s a way of living, of perceiving the world—and anyone who tries to enclose it in a category has not understood the beginning of it.
Philosophy, literature, poetry—fragments are at the center of what happened in the recent history of writing.
But it goes beyond that, at least for two reasons.
First, because in the visual arts, since the birth of Conceptual art, we are witnessing more and more artists exhibiting statements. This is the case for Jenny Holzer: she created a series called Truisms made of nearly three hundred one-liners. I will quote some of them, for the pleasure: a sense of timing is the mark of genius / the new is nothing but a restatement of the old / you can’t fool others if you fool yourself.
If you add the works of artists like Barbara Kruger, Lawrence Wiener or, more recently, Christopher Wool, it is quite obvious that text has taken a prominent role in the visual arts, in the privileged form of fragment.
You can go even further. What is the textual form of social media ? Fragments. What is the form of the notifications daily received on smartphones ? Fragments. What form have the words we see on posters everywhere in the streets ? Fragments. Which means that fragments may not only be a new way to write and read and think for writers or artists, but for every human being in the twenty-first century.
*It could be argued that Schlegel was already writing philosophical fragments in the 18th century—and that would be appropriate. But Nietzsche brings the form to its completion by according it to the substance of his texts.
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