Only by coming to an end does a written work take shape as a whole, and the ending itself – the last sentence – is thrown into relief by the white space that follows. My aim in this short piece is to consider what happens when that white space proliferates, giving way to deliberate fragmentation. With the decision to write in fragments, endings are withheld or multiplied, depending on perspective. I consider some effects of this decision by examining divergent examples from Friedrich Schlegel and Charles Baudelaire, both of whom address the formal consequences of writing in brief without singular end. For Friedrich Schlegel, writing around 1800, fragments are part of the early romantic project of generating critical reflection on the day and age through the practice of self-limitation. Half a century later, in the prose poems first published in 1862, Charles Baudelaire pursues the disruption of classical verse into the experiential disconnects of newly modern life. Schlegel and Baudelaire thus offer valuable lessons in engaging with the contemporary moment by stopping short only to start again. Their respective modes of fragmentation – wildly different little beasts – serve to demonstrate that there is no one way to pursue endlessness in finitude.

Schlegel’s Hedgehog

When Friedrich Schlegel assembled the Fragmente that appeared between 1797 and 1800 – including some symphilosophical collaborations – he was embracing the disruptive potential of pluralized brevity.1 This potential has been realized throughout literary history in different forms, most relevantly for Schlegel in French moralist maxims from the 17th and 18th centuries.2 Like the French moralists – specifically Chamfort, whose work he references as a point of departure3 – Schlegel uses short form for critical reflection on the constitution of the present. Both maxims and fragments link observations about the human condition with commentary on recent societal events. Yet whereas Chamfort cultivates his “état d’épigramme”4 in order to shine harsh light on human behaviour and the social mores of his day from a position of cynical remove, Schlegel flexes his expansive notion of romantic Witz to channel the energy of contemporary intellectual developments – political, scientific, philosophical, metaphysical – into poetic writing that breeds connection.5 By referring to his texts as fragments, Schlegel puts his own modern spin on formal brevity, a tradition characterized by disruption. Unlike what we know from antiquity, early romantic fragments are not pieces broken off from a larger, lost, past original. These fragments are fragmentary from the outset, integral only to romantic projects of progressive realization: “projects that one could call fragments from the future”, as Schlegel writes in Athenäum Fragment #22.6

Sidestepping the pull of the greater romantic conceptual cosmos to remain focussed on the question of endings, I will go no further than the form of the fragment. The most vivid outline emerges from Athenäeum Fragment #206:

A fragment, like a small work of art, must be entirely separate from the surrounding world and complete in itself, like a hedgehog.7

This short sentence with its dual similes speaks volumes. Indeed, the early romantic conception of artworks warranted a dissertation from Walter Benjamin, who demonstrated how Schlegel and company shifted the endlessly connective force of critical reflection from transcendental philosophical inquiry to artistic production.8 For my limited purposes, the second similarity is the relevant one. A fragment, similar to a work of art in its capacity for endless critical reflection, is also like a hedgehog in being small, separate from the world, and complete in itself. While it may appear contradictory to define a fragment in terms of completeness, the romantic capacity to think present finitude alongside progressive becoming comfortably accomodates such tension.9 Hedgehogs react to perceived external threat by rolling up into balls, making themselves as small as possible, pointing their quills outward. So too must romantic fragments, wherein smallness becomes shortness. Becoming small is a reflex of self-preservation for hedgehogs, while in written fragments, shortness constitutes a formal means of self-limitation.

The concept of self-limitation, at work throughout the fragments and embodied by the hedgehog, is fully articulated in #37 of the Kritische Fragmente. This fragment also explicitly addresses the question of how to come to an end in writing. The text opens with the unintuitive assertion that in order to write about something well, one must no longer be interested in it, because enthusiastic interest is not conducive to prudent communication; as long as such interest persists, one will want to say everything, and no good can come of that (to paraphrase). Schlegel’s proposed solution to this problem is self-limitation, which he describes as the “most necessary and highest” consideration:

In this way, he [the artist who wants to say everything] fails to recognize the value and dignity of self-limitation [Selbstbeschränkung], which for artist as for man is the first and last, the most necessary and highest. The most necessary: for wherever one does not limit oneself, one is limited by the world, and thus becomes a servant [Knecht]. The highest: for one can only limit oneself at the points and on the sides where one has endless power, self-creation and self-destruction.10

To limit oneself is to evade subjection to limits that would otherwise be imposed by the world, and it is a way to exercise the infinite power of self-creation and self-destruction where that power is personally available. When it comes to writing – or “even a friendly conversation that cannot break off freely at any moment”, as Schlegel continues – the desire to say everything is an “illiberal” impulse. This ungainly word is crucial: Schlegel uses it in three different forms in the course of Fragment #37 (illiberal, Illiberales, Illiberalität). In the reverse of what one might assume, it is the attempt to be without limits that negates personal liberty. The inability to cut off one’s writing – or chatting – at any moment is actually a failure to remain free. Early romantic fragments are a literary space cultivated for such liberty through self-limitation, with smart little hedgehogs as a living example of what this looks like on the ground.

Baudelaire’s Snake

To consider fragmentation from a different and more ambivalent angle, I turn from Schlegel’s fragments to the later works of Baudelaire, a jump supported by their shared interest in the French moralists and the heterogenous tradition of brief, discontinuous, critical writing.11 The publication of Les Fleurs du mal in its first full edition in 1857 already disrupted the French literary establishment enough to land him in court, with charges of obscenity and calls for censorship. In the decade that followed, his last, Baudelaire was at loose ends in many ways. Living abroad in detested Belgium, he struggled with mounting debt, advancing illness, and engulfing bitterness. His writing increasingly took the form of fragmentary prose, published only posthumously from incomplete manuscripts of loose papers. While Baudelaire did envision some of these pieces ultimately coming together into books, the decision for fragments was nevertheless purposeful, and revelatory of the author’s grappling with the question of how to write as much as how to live.12

The particular value that Baudelaire sees in fragmentation is most clearly articulated at an intermediary moment in his literary career, between the metred (if nevertheless genre-bending) verse of Fleurs and the incomplete (arguably incompletable) late prose works. Between these two poles lie Baudelaire’s prose poems. Envisioned for a volume to be titled Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen),13 twenty of these texts were published in the La Presse in 1862, introduced by a letter to the editor which begins as follows:

For Arsène Houssaye

Dear friend, I send you a work no one can claim not to make head or tail of, since, on the contrary, there is at once both head and tail, alternating and reciprocal. Consider, I beg you, how admirably convenient this combination makes it for each and all – you, me, the reader. We may stop whenever we like, I my daydream, you the manuscript, the reader his reading – whose stubborn will I would not hold to the unbroken thread of some superfluous plot. Cut out any vertebra and the two pieces of this serpentine fantasy will easily rejoin. Chop it into many fragments and you will see how each is able to exist apart. Hoping some of these stumps will be lively enough to please and amuse you, I make bold to dedicate to you the entire snake.14

Baudelaire presents a kind of fragmentation that differs dramatically from Schlegel’s model of fragment as hedgehog:15 here we have a serpent, and a very strange serpent at that, with neither connective spinal cord nor systemic interdependence. What the two animals have in common, however, is the ability to cut themselves off at any point. Whereas Schlegel’s hedgehog does so by rolling up, Baudelaire’s snake comes apart. The detachable pieces of this creature can exist on their own or in any recombination, providing maximum flexibility for author, editor, and reader alike to pick up and drop off when and where they please. In the letter, Baudelaire proceeds to explain that his aim with these texts had been to achieve “the description of modern life” through the “miracle of a poetic prose”; however, he declares in closing, he has landed elsewhere, a “mischance” (accident, in French) that is profoundly humiliating for a poetic spirit bent on a particular accomplishment.16 Looking beyond Baudelaire’s professed humiliation, if the little prose poems are an accidental divergence, than this is perhaps in perfect keeping with the very modern life he seeks to describe – a life in fragments.

Without distinction between head and tail, a work that goes on living even when dissected is truly monstrous from a classical perspective. The segments of Paris Spleen are animated by murky urban situations, layered with surreal encounters and lyrical complaint that does not come to an end with any final period.17 In one, for example, an uncharacterized “pedestrian” stumbles into and out of the “Cemetery View Tavern”, contemplating “life’s brevity” as he wanders among gravestones in the heat and sun. Surrounded by a cacophony of insects – “an immense rustle of life […] life of the infinitely small” – and gunfire from the neighbouring shooting range, he hears a voice rising from the tombs to remonstrate against noisy mortals disturbing the rest of those who have already reached “‘the only true aim of detestable life!’”18 This would be quite the last sentence, if it were one; instead, the cemetery scene is quickly followed by the next prose poem, a dialogue between two angels, one of whom has dropped his halo into the mud of the bustling boulevard. This hastily abbreviated juxtaposition, only one of many possible, is meant to highlight how the fragmentation that Baudelaire presents with his poetic prose does not rely on connection or closure to carry on slithering with life at every level of experience.

A Fragmentary Animal for Every Present Moment?

Taking the liberty to stop short rather than conclude, I will leave you with the proposition that there may be as many ways to write without end as there are small animals, animating literary history even as they minutely populate the wide world. Schlegel’s hedgehog, a ball of self-limitation, remains free to make ever more connections within itself and in the projected future. Baudelaire’s snake, offering itself up for dissection, shows modern life persisting even as it comes apart. With these models in mind, I am left wondering what kind of animal(s) might be called for to embody fragments of writing that would be fit to meet our current moment, capable of survival or even flourishing in hostile climates. Surely there must be any number of creatures yet scurrying or swimming or slinking – scratching or stinging or swarming – just beyond the next last sentence, ready to show us how to cut ourselves off in order to best stay present for now.