О МОДУСАХ ФРАГМЕНТАРНОГО ПИСЬМА (СЕМЬ ФРАГМЕНТОВ)

Abstract

I offer an ensemble of seven fragments featuring modernist and postmodernist authors who practiced fragmentary writing. Fragmented writing is seen as a way of addressing the epistemological problem of part and whole, the aesthetic architectonics of part and whole, as well as existential issues (death, end / nonfinalism). Accordingly, through the prism of modernist artists (Schwitters, Bellmer, Rilke, Mandelstam), the attitude to fragment and whole is demonstrated, which forms a special poetics of dissociation of speech, reconstruction and deconstruction of artifact body and novel character, subversion of narrative mechanisms, including problematization of visual work frame, beginning and end of narrative text. It is revealed that the destructed, fragmented image of the world is often expressed in traditional genres or exploited by stylizing and parodying them. Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Adorno and Hamacher are considered as philosophers and philologists who have chosen the form of fragment (collection of aphorisms, notes and extracts, quotations). In their modus operandi of reflection and style there is a connection with the early Romantic tradition of the fragment, according to which the fragment is both an isolated, completed short text and part of the whole (in the pragmatic sense, an ensemble of fragments; in the epistemological sense, an absolute whole). For Schlegel and Novalis the connection between the fragment and the whole was thought of as an anticipation of the whole in an infinite series of acts of reflection: the whole is unattainable, but the process is infinite. In the 20th and 21st centuries the difficulty, up to complete negation in poststructuralism, of grasping the transcendental signifier evokes a sense of melancholy and nostalgia, and provokes a utopian return to archaic, ascetic escapism. Fragmented writing thus becomes a form of reaction to the modernist acceleration of time, the instrumentalization of the mind and the alienation of the person. The review presented here is stylized in the form of notes-fragments, linked by leitmotifs and a number of ideas that allow not only the construction but also the problematization of fragmented writing.