seriously fragmented
Posted by Gordon on November 4, 2008
As you’ll maybe know, I’m a big fan of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow; a magically serious book on the surface about late 20th century Turkey; collusions as much as tensions between liberals and socialists and fundamentalists and lust and business and pride and history and isolation and fairy stories. It evokes many moods, two of them curiously like the fantastical plot twists of the Master and Margarita or the air of parallel reality in the scenes of the castle with beasts in Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
My last post was a celebration of Philippe Delerms’ celebrations of tiny moments of everyday life; and, perhaps related, I have been reflecting on – or rather justifying the brevity and idiosyncracy of - my own miniscules, these blog entries. Comforting then to read Pamuk reporting his friend’s remark about Walter Benjamin: [His] oeuvre is, like life itself, boundless and therefore fragmentary, and this is why so many literary critics tried so hard to give the pieces meaning, just as they did with life. And every time I [Pamuk] smile and say, “One day I’ll write a book that’s made only from fragments too.”*
Fragments more than whole stories or argued essays are places from where sparks of association strike in the reader’s mind. Or in this case the author’s.
My first link is to the richness of Elliot Weinberger’s fragments - An Elemental Thing for example – the text’s purpose being obscure, no plot or line of argument to guide it, the reader’s mind is challenged to make something of it but, if the challenge is accepted, free to move in many directions.
A second: one can’t help thinking of Taleb’s rails against storytelling/cause finding when we seek to mollify history and downplay the randomness of events.
* Orhan Pamuk Other Colours: Writings on Life, Art, Books and Cities p xi
