Self-Limiting Hedgehogs and DivisibleSnakes : Select Lessons on Fragmentation from F. Schlegel and Baudelaire

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.