The Plural Book and the Authorial Portrait

Abstract

In 1800 Friedrich Schlegel proposed that “in a perfect literature all books should be only a single book, and in such an eternally developing book, the gospel of humanity and culture will be revealed” (Ideas 95.102–3). While this cultural ensemble is “the new, eternal gospel [which] will appear as a bible,” it is also “a system of books,” seemingly a system of all the divinely inspired books which like “all the classical poems of the ancients are coherent, inseparable; they form an organic whole” (Ideas 95). Conversely, Schlegel recognized that the singular proto-book, the Bible, is in itself “actually a system of books” and is presumably constituted of the sorts of fragments that he describes in Athenaeum 77 in terms of dialogue, letters, and memoirs: “A dialogue is a chain or garland of fragments. An exchange of letters is a dialogue on a larger scale, and memoirs constitute a system of fragments” (Athenaeum 77.27). My concern in this chapter is not with Schlegel’s argument at the macro or cultural level, that “all books should be only a single book” or that each is organically “a necessary part in a system of all the sciences.” Rather, at the micro level I wish to pursue his suggestion that each book is itself fragmentary and, as Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy suggest, plural: materially configured in “a chain or garland of fragments.” As we saw in the last chapter, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy note that for early German romantics such as Schlegel who seek to counter Kant’s monolithic critical system, “fragmentation constitutes the properly romantic vision of the system, if by ‘System’ … one understands not the so-called systematic ordering of an ensemble, but that by which and as which an ensemble holds together” (46). The statement emphasizes not system in its wholeness but the diverse parts of an ensemble that system somehow “holds together,” and one of the ensembles cited by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy is the book. For such early romantics as Schlegel, if “the bible remains or once more becomes the model of the book, it does so, as can be seen in several instances … as the plural book (la biblia), and as such, as One” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 45).