Theory of the fragment: Rilke.

Theory and practice of the fragment in German Romanticism. To be contrasted with Modern concept of the fragment. Not fragment as enigmatic object of melancholy contemplation, the pathos of the incomplete etc, but fragment as material for construction. See this:

Rilke, Letter to Clara about Rodin

1. Each of these fragments is of such a peculiarly striking unity, so possible by itself, so little in need of completion, that you forget they are only parts and often parts of different bodies which cling so passionately to one antother.

2. Here the torso of one figure with the head of another stuck onto it, with the arm of a third… as though an unspeakable storm, an unparalleled cataclysm had passed over his work. And yet the closer you look the deeper you fel that it would be all the less complete if the separate bodies were complete.

3.You feel suddenly that it is more the concern of the scholar to apprehend bodies as wholes – more that of the artist to create new combinations from the parts, new, greater, more legitimate unities..

The commentator Glob adds:

'What is the 'cataclysm' but the artist's own energy - some deviant energy which blows apart the world's habitual shapes, dislocates things out of true, only to imbue the remaining fragments with a new intensity. To tear apart the world as God or Nature made it and to reinvent and rename it in accordance with another force, a force which excarnates itself in several works without being ever exhausted by them, leaving them behind as 'evidence' of the energy which moulded and animated them but which is now alreaedy elsewhere'.

And back to Rilke:

This is the essential, that you should not stop at dreams, at intentions, at being in the mood, but that you should transpose everything into things with all your strength.