On Fragmentary Writing

In Baguio City’s Victor Oteyza Community Art Space (VOCAS), an undergrad class of around thirty students had been sitting on the polished stone floors, waiting for their turn to perform. It was the third and concluding night of their trip; the sky had barely a star shed light through the open roof, and the air — biting the skin on their arms — felt as if their bodies had been left waiting at the bus station — a distant, familiar warmth.

For three days, these college kids had been writing poems — on the bus while in transit, in their hotel rooms, and wherever it was they could find the words. They would consult each handwritten piece with their Creative Writing professor, a poet and dancer, who encouraged them to dig deep for metaphors; to “show don’t tell”; and to distill their thoughts and feelings into tiny, little things that they could fit inside a box; to remember and create. Called the Soul Project, their professor would tell them, with a bottle of Red Horse in her hand, stories of her gypsy-like life that once circled these spaces. She had found home in the city and recalled to us a collage of voices.

Enamored of the journey, I asked — Is this not the relationship between the writer and belongingness? — how one’s character is shaped by having memories of existence, existing, of being somewhere, like in the city? A decade since, I find myself contemplating on the memory of the spaces we inhabit, its fragmentary nature, and the way it transcends into my writing.

Writing for myself

To me, writing has always been a skill serving some semblance of purpose: scribbling and doodling comic book stories on stapled pieces of pad paper to pass around class, lyricizing my teenaged angst, now innocent and juvenile attempts at poetry, into melodies no one would hear, and later on, writing blogs, online articles, and ad copy, composing business emails at the office — these have all shaped my character, but none more impactful than diving deep into the craft of fiction writing.

Take this parceling of self-historicization as an example; it is through the fragmentariness of an experience/s wherein I locate the poetics of my writing. In chunky pieces, slivers of clarity, the sensational in grasping nothing, and even in the absence of words, the audience is presented a story only truly accessible through the author’s piecing and re-piecing of memory.

The craft of writing during that undergrad trip had been centered on movement — departing Manila, the roads-in-between, and our arrival in Baguio City served as the skeleton of a triptych, the linking of verses reminiscent of a renga.

Understanding fragmentary writing

In fragmentary writing, structure is met with a careful perspective on an overarching scheme of things. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982), for example, is an autobiographical work divided into several seemingly structured parts. Throughout the book, the reader comes across a variety of forms as a study in memory, and its complex fragmentation is embodied by this expanse of a literary collage.

In an essay, “Fragmentary: Writing in a Digital Age,” Guy Patrick Cunningham writes that the mode “accumulates fragments of text and presents them in a way that encourages introspection and contemplation.”[1] And in Dictee, we see that at the core of its fragmentariness is the coming together of the fractured forms employed by the author. The audience bears witness to the stories of women from different worlds; and we are given to understand that through the fracturing, these stories are about what it means to suffer all the same, but in different ways.

Meanwhile, in Xiaolu Guo’s Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth (2000), the reader is given a a glimpse of China and its changing identity after the Cultural Revolution, written in non-linear prose, as the female protagonist comes of age. The modern fragmented novel demands that it becomes part of the author’s role to also be both an architect and engineer; to erect a structure for the audience to interact with through a deconstructed experience. Ted Goia, in an article published online, “The Rise of the Fragmented Novel (An Essay in 26 Fragments),” writes about how recent works (novels published in the 2000s) have been exhibiting holism and coalescence, instead of “disjunction and dissolution.”[2] Similar to Dictee, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth offers its audience a fractured reading experience, but unlike Cha’s magnum opus, Guo’s novel offers a broken narrative through the protagonist’s search for freedom.

A brief history of fragmentariness in literature

In the poems for that trip to Baguio, motion proved to be the unifying theme, structured on the journey and its chronology. The travel from the capital’s city streets and up the winding roads of the mountain range had been divided into three pieces, which then pushed forth structural fragmentation.

As a manifestation of contemporariness, Goia writes that “it [‘new fragmented novel’] resists disunity, even as it appears to embody it.” He attempts to trace how the form came to be, and explains that there are three phases of fragmentation in novels: the fix-up, the cut-up, and the third phase, which he only describes as one that “seeks an exemplary wholeness, a fitting together of the fragments into brilliant patterns. … More like pieces of a glorious jigsaw puzzle”[3], introduces the modern idea of the fragmentary novel—why not call it the “build-up”?

Goia credits A. E. van Vogt with the term, “fix-up.” This first phase refers to writers repackaging a series of short stories into novels; driven by financial reasons. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a collection of sketches and short stories set in a locale based on the author’s childhood memories, is a parceling of experiences into several chapbooks. Through a macro lens, we see that the collection offers a singular but unthreaded narrative in the world inhabited by its characters; that being said, it is the main protagonist’s coming of age that sews the story together; a novel-of-sorts.

The second phase was called the “cut-up,” which references the beatnik process of William Burroughs. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), a non-linear narrative of loosely assembled texts, serves as the model for the fragmented novel at its peak. Taken from his own indulgences, it was Burroughs’ intention as author to present these vignettes as random and whimsically intertwined. Fragmentary writing at this point appeared to be a form closer to Dadaist thought.

The third phase, which includes David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) in lists of books that exemplify the new style of fragmented novels, is a return to structure and restructure. The fragmentary manner in which the novels had been crafted is apparent in both style and plot. The diverse, shifting aesthetics in each chapter of Cloud Atlas and the disjointed, interwoven narratives in A Visit from the Goon Squad offer the reader a similar cathartic experience. The font styles and languages in Cloud Atlas, for instance, create a separation between chapters that, as a collective, dictate a universal inevitable for humankind. A Visit from the Goon Squad, on the one hand, is a novel that plays with the passing of time, assembled through a variety of texts that tell an unsaid story. The disparate timelines and apparent disconnection between chapters fracture the narrative, but the characters’ lives, as we read on, are all interwoven throughout the books in this third phase of the fragmented novel.

The assemblage of fragments, as the focal point of the craft, leads to the creation of a cohesive story; it is in the disconnected narratives — essential parts to building the novel’s grand structure — wherein the audience is handed a shovel. To dig deeper, shave off and cleave blotches of what could be concrete, break ground, and reach the core.

Fragmentary writing today

Given that we’re in the Digital Age, I’ve been thinking about how fragmentary writing on the web crafts the audience’s experience. After all, the way we browse the internet, use social media, and engage web content on a daily basis is already a fragmented journey — the audience is more than “just a reader.” Blocks of text with ads, hyperlinks, embedded videos, photos, infographics, and moving images like GIFs — these are but a few manifestations of modern fragmentary writing in everyday life. Leveraging the mode of storytelling through an electronic device as an interactive experience, however, is another discussion.

As part of our requirements for the Soul Project, I had performed three poems, reciting every stanza as I undressed to reveal the words vandalized on my skin. The body as a vessel — on my arms were verses in black ink, graffiti that crawled unto my chest and abdomen, and on my back, the titles of the three poems coalesced, forming a poem in itself:

Shadows Casting Shadows

In Stopovers, We Live

To Shiver.

That evening in Baguio now feels like a haze — the blurred faces of my classmates in the crowd, the shadows formed by the halogen yellow lighting, and the edge of the city air’s teeth grazing my skin. These are just shards, a collection of moments in the past, but the stillness is distilled in my head; pieces of a decade-old memory that I can always revisit as roots to my poetics.

[1] Cunningham, Guy Patrick. “Fragmentary: Writing in a Digital Age.” The Millions, themillions.com/2012/01/fragmentary-writing-in-a-digital-age.html. Accessed 6 December 2017.

[2] Goia, Ted. “The Rise of the Fragmented Novel.” Fractious Fiction, fractiousfiction.com/rise_of_the_fragmented_novel. Accessed 15 November 2017.

[3] See Goia

3/5 photos grabbed from Facebook c/o Marianne Freya and Carmela Sagritalo