In “Essay as Hack”, writer Ander Monson says: “I believe in the fragment. It’s the most honest representation of anything. It acknowledges gaps, its lack of comprehensiveness, its ability to surround and control a subject, an idea.”
I’ve been thinking about fragments recently. Fragments in writing and fragments in life. They are perhaps all we have for knowing and for conveying reality. Yet their importance is so often overlooked in an effort to universalize, to set the big picture, work threads together into a conclusion. Perhaps we should pay more attention to the process of selecting fragments. There is a responsibility inherent in seeking them out, choosing which to linger on and which to pass by.
Fragments can be so many things of course: an image, an action. Or a voice in the crowd. Salman Rushdie recently shared in the New Yorker (extracted from his new memoir) a valuable piece of advice from the professor who taught him at Cambridge, Arthur Hibbert: “You must never write history until you can hear the people speak.”
I’m reading Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin.” The writing is beautiful in many ways. It has a strong rhythm: mostly really short sentences while occasionally launching into a rolling long one. And he is a master of individual voices, whether those of the various narrators or voices that make a brief appearance. McCann has himself apparently described his work as “an accumulation of voices.” The opening scene describes the onlooking crowd’s reaction to the beginning of Philipe Petit’s walk on a tightrope between the Twin Towers (though Petit isn’t named). A pulsating page-long sentence ends like this:
“…and the whole August morning was blown wide open, and the watchers stood rooted, there was no going anywhere for a while, the voices rose to a crescendo, all sorts of accents, a babel until a small redheaded man in the Home Title Guarantee Company on Church Street lifted the sash of his office window, placed his elbows on the sill, took a deep breath, leaned out, and roared into the distance: Do it, asshole!”
Communicating, and particularly writing, is a process of selecting fragments, whether we like it or not. There is something tragic in the fact that we can never grasp an entirety despite our claims to do so. Even those closest to us, we only know fragments of what is going on in their minds, can only know them partially. But so be it. Our memories, and perhaps you could even say our lives, are composed of fragments. So all the more reason to pay close attention to them: watching, listening, retaining. Some just fall by the wayside, some we cling onto. Others get buried in deep pockets to be rediscovered.
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In this interview with Colum McCann when he won the 2009 National Book Award, he's asked how he went "about evoking a landscape that would imbue the book with such power and resonance". He replies:
"The place was made for me already. New York is such a vibrant place to write about. Eight million stories colliding all at once. And what a landscape to operate in. The eye never gets tired. Even the garbage can be acrobatic. So I just look for the language that will reflect that. Our language is so deeply influenced by landscape, and vice versa. But mostly for me it has to do with rhythm and sound. As a writer you have to try to find the music of that place. If it’s the west of Ireland it’s a different music to what it is in New York. So I went out and listened to the different instruments that the city plays".
And while I'm gleaning from that interview, there's this, too:
"...my first lesson to my students is that I can’t teach them anything at all. They look a little stunned at first, but then I tell them that it’s all about desire, stamina and perseverance, and if they have that, it will feed their innate talent. And I also tell them to try to write outside of themselves. It is my philosophy that we shouldn’t write what we know. That’s boring and ordinary. Rather, we should write towards what we want to know."
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