Thoughts on Fragment One

Clearly still feeling his way towards the sort of style which characterises his later work, S.W. here uses his distinctive syntax to bring us the full force of that "sound of full idiot". In later work, of course, as his confidence increases, that style will harden into flickering shards of clarity, but here S.W. seems to be still exploring his voice, and using it to represent the sheer incoherence and instability of the world.

And yet, for all the idiocy, “by told tale a is it more”. With this arresting line, S.W. sets out his stall. The patterns of foolishness and fury we perceive in the world can only be increased, aggravated, by the act of storytelling. No tale can ease our pain, no effort to impose narrative order can be a salve. We will not hear such nonsense from S.W. - "No heard is then". A strikingly modern concept, that the conventions of narrative realism are shackles that tug us deeper into the mire.

But what of the player poor? And what does he play? Where does he "stage...his frets"? Some form of viol or lute is being alluded to here. S.W. casts himself in the role of jester or musician -- making tunes with sheer language. He mocks our attempts to make sense of a world of patterned language with yet more language. All that can be done is to make music -- that shadow walking beside structured, mortal, language, casting off Death, lighting fools along the dusty way.

In the second half of the fragment, the temporal focus shifts hectically from future to present to past, and all sense of time-flow as we understand it is thrown out the window. Days and hours, time past and recorded, time yet to come in that circular succession of tomorrows, the repeated use of temporal vocabulary -- of "pace" and "brief" and "time" itself --, the magnificent compression of mood and tense and sense in the lines "Word a such for time a been/have would there hereafter died have" -- where the illusory comforts offered by words themselves are instantly exploded into near-nonsense -- in all this the sense of hallucinatory introrse alienation is palpable. He asks us, plaintively, "Have yesterdays our all?" Is it all over? Are we cut adrift by our need to make sense of our world and our past, to entrap ourselves in a skein of language? Is the only truth we think we know entirely down to the ersatz stories we construct to explain our yesterdays?

Perhaps so.

One question remains - who is “she”? Why should “she” die? We can but wait for S.W. to reveal himself in further Fragments.