“Reading can be freefall,” runs the blurb on the back of Anne Carson’s new poetry collection, one of several recently published books to offer readers a more interactive way to engage with the printed word. Historically, fragmentation has been used as a troubling effect, or to indicate a subject under stress. These books, however, attempt to unleash the fragment’s liberating force. The effect can be exhilarating.



If the title of Carson’s collection, Float, suggests a lack of direction, so does its format: a transparent slipcase housing 22 chapbooks that we are invited to read in any order. Does that mean the collection doesn’t, then, possess an overall unity? Or is it possible for we readers to supply meaning ourselves?



In 2002, Carson published her translations of Sappho’s poetry, a body of work that, bar a single poem, only exists in fragments because the papyri on which they were written are so damaged. As Carson writes in Float of one work by Sappho: “Half the poem is empty space.” Her translations communicate this fragmentation to the reader, using brackets to convey where the source texts are torn or disintegrated. “Brackets,” she writes in her introduction to the poems, “are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp – brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure”.

To present what is missing from a fragmentary text not as a lack, but as an opportunity to put the imagination to work, shows an uncommon adventurousness of thought, and helps explain why Carson should structure her latest book in a way that provides similar “free spaces”. It is more typical in literature that the fragmented narrative indicates something broken.

Frantumaglia, a memoir from Elena Ferrante (fictional or otherwise), is named for a word used by her mother “to describe how she felt when she was racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart. She said that inside her she had a frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments.” This destabilising use of fragmentation is one of the primary features of modernism because writers were attempting to capture how the early 20th-century world, be it James Joyce’s Dublin, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin or John Dos Passos’s Manhattan, overloaded the human mind. This mind was one that Freud’s psychological theories had only recently identified as being fragmented itself. Something like this perception is at work in a section of Float where Carson uses a series of bullet points to disconnectedly tell a story about a border crossing. In a postscript she writes:



There are many ways to tell a story. A guy told me what happened to him at the border. I put some points on file cards. Every time I tried to fill in what happens between the file cards, I lost the story. I didn’t really know him. It was like a winter sky, high, thin, restless, unfulfilled. That’s when I started to think about the word flotage.

There is also the kind of fragmentation that seems to want to actively repel the reader, like a wall topped with broken glass. In How to Like If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso by Gertrude Stein, Carson describes a section of Stein’s poem in which she discusses Picasso’s hair as compared with Napoleon’s hair, only to suddenly start talking about trains:



I don’t know why trains. Often when reading Gertrude Stein, I have the sense I’m getting the gist and I ride along a while in good faith, then all at once she switches tracks and there I’m left standing, as it were, at the station.

Here we have moved away from fragmentation as “imaginal adventure”; now it is a labyrinth, constructed to confound us. It is this sort of experience that most obviously marks out fragmented narratives as difficult texts, whether the book in question is JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

However the reader orders the material is provisional, it will almost certainly differ the next time she engage

But in each of these cases, as in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, where the poet refers to “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”, fragmentation is an effect applied to the text: the how, as opposed to the what, that suggests the potential for the fragmented state to be made whole. In Float, fragmentation occupies a more central position: however the reader orders the material is provisional, it will almost certainly differ the next time she engages.



Awarding fragmentation a similar prominence, Emmanuelle Pagano’s Trysting (translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis) uses polyphony to map the many different strains of love and sexuality. Each section, ranging in length from a sentence to a few pages, has a different subject. There is a possibility that some sections are linked, but given the lack of names or other identifying details it is almost impossible to tell. The narrative functions like a montage, letting us inhabit a host of minds and stay just long enough to realise the comedy, violence, or tenderness of a particular situation.



Reading the book is a kaleidoscopic experience, the fragmented structure letting Pagano focus solely on a specific experience at a specific time without needing to dilute her text with the distractions of characterisation, setting or chronology. Her experiment succeeds because of the range of her insight and the skill with which she shifts register: from wistfulness to blunt force, or from fantasy to naturalism.



Nocilla Experience (translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead) operates on a similarly large scale. The second volume of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla trilogy, it divides itself between a disorientating array of narrative strands taking place across the world, from Madrid to Chicago to the Ukraine. It churns through cultural artefacts, quoting from film, New York Times book reviews and physics lectures. One reviewer compared it to channel hopping, but the multimedia sources of material the book draws on make it more like having multiple browser windows open, and compulsively tabbing between them.



Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra review – choose your own Chilean misadventure Read more

The appearance of the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar as a character in the Nocilla novel is Mallo’s way of paying tribute to one of the most celebrated fragmented narratives of all: Hopscotch. The 155 chapters of Cortázar’s book are split into two categories, essential and non-essential, and the reader is encouraged to hop between them according to their preference. “Cortázar,” writes the translator Ilan Stavans, “wants the reader to be active, engaged.” So does Mallo, as the incorporation of Hopscotch into his novel proves. Just as Cortázar’s book includes a chapter consisting of a transcription of a 19th-century Iberian novel, so Nocilla includes passages taken from the opening pages of Hopscotch.



“In its own way,” Cortázar writes alongside the “Table of Instructions” at the beginning of Hopscotch, “this book consists of many books”. Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell) goes further: it consists of an almost infinite number of books. Adopting the format of an early 1990s Chilean secondary school exam, it sets the reader a series of questions with multiple-choice answers. The decisions the reader must make are mostly compositional: rearranging sentences into a preferred order, selecting words or lines to delete. The effect is a masterful act of transformation that turns reader into writer. Zambra gives us fragments, but he also gives us the autonomy to shore them up into something new: our very own book.



The line in Float that comes closest to Zambra’s project comes in Merry Christmas from Hegel, which begins with Carson trying to understand a point the philosopher makes in his writing about speculation. “Speculation,” she says, “being the effort to grasp reality in its interactive entirety”. The act of choosing our answers in Multiple Choice, or shuffling Float’s chapbooks into our favoured order, are interactive processes that have meaning as their ultimate goal. But as with any subjective material, such as literature, this search for meaning is necessarily a speculative one. Hegel, Carson tells us, considers speculation to be the proper business of philosophy, but she also implies that it is the proper business of art.



Through the fragmentary ... we can somehow arrive at a more profound understanding of the world

Later in the same piece, Carson stands in a snowbound wood: “Minus twenty degrees in the wind but inside the trees is no wind. The world,” she writes, as everyday noises fade into a deep peace, “subtracts itself in layers”. The moment seems to suggest that through the fragmentary – the chance associations triggered by reading Hegel before entering a wood, for example – we can somehow arrive at a more profound understanding of the world. In this way, Pagano’s snippets of stories can be seen not as partial glimpses of an unseen whole but the distillation of her subject, the fragment recast as kernel: not the incidental detail, but the essential part that must not be discarded.



In Nocilla Experience, Mallo quotes DJ Shadow (a musician who at the outset of his career built his tracks entirely from samples, ie fragments of other work) comparing his process to architecture: “for me the drums are the foundations. Once you’ve got the foundations, each floor you add to the building is harder and harder. To add parts that can help, that might form part of the whole, is harder still; it’s like making a building that gets smaller the higher it goes.”

The process is the same one of layering that Carson describes, but in reverse. That the process should become more difficult as each additional layer is added demonstrates that every fragment Mallo employs is intended to work in tandem with what has come before, and what will come after, to “form part of the whole”. This sequencing of apparently disconnected material carries a meaning for those attuned enough to hear it: the signal within the noise.

