Wordsworth’s Re-Formation of Individuality: "Spots of Time," the Fragment and the Autobiography

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Mikyung Park
Read a Romantic Fragment Poem,” Literature Compass 5: 1 (2008): 73-89.
2
In his 1784 essay, Kant defines Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from
his self-incurred immaturity
. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own
understanding without the guidance of another” (54). An individual’s freedom
is achievable only with the “public use” of his reason (55); that is,
Enlightenment is possible only through an individual’s courage to think inde-
pendently and yet predicated upon the collective efforts of mankind to pursue
freedom. For Kant, Enlightenment is a task to achieve slowly; he calls his age
an “age of enlightenment,” not “an enlightened age” (58). 

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ature derived from a philosophical context in German Romanticism,
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy remark on the paradoxi-
cal but unavoidable characteristic of fragments: “[f]ragmentary totality”
at once in the whole and in the part (44). Put differently, while each frag-
ment is complete in itself, it never ceases to be a reminder of the whole;
totality is “the fragment itself in its completed individuality” (Ibid.).
Hence, it is quite relevant to refer to Rodolphe Gaschè’s method of visu-
alizing these equivalents: “fragment = system = work = individual” (xii).
For the Romantics, the fragment does not preclude “the idea of the sys-
tem,” which is “nothing less than the idea of totality” (xi-xii). Regarding
the seemingly contradictory equation of the fragment to totality, Gaschè
maintains that “fragmentation constitutes the properly Romantic vision
of the system”; fragmentation “conceives of the absolute under the form
of the individual, of totality as being at the same time finite and plural”
(xiii).
My essay seeks to argue that Schlegel’s formulation of the fragment is
pertinent to our understanding of Wordsworth’s attempt to re-form indi-
viduality in two salient “spots of time” passages in Book Twelve of The
Prelude
(12.208). Wordsworth’s project of writing an autobiography is
imposed on matter that is a literary assemblage of fragmented memories.
More precisely, by applying the Schlegelian concept of the fragment to
the “spots of time,” I try to elucidate the correspondence between
Romantic fragmentation and individuality, by utilizing the concept of
organic unity as the bridge. In Wordsworth’s re-formation of individuali-
ty through and towards a literary form of the autobiography, i.e., writing
of “memory or archive of the living,”
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The Prelude
, which still antici-
pates The Recluse, is an unfinished poetic incarnation of fragmentation;
thus, it points to an eternal aspiration for (as well as a deferral of) the
whole, although it achieves wholeness in itself.
Both “spots of time” can be read as separate poems and integral parts
Wordsworth’s Re-Formation of Individuality: “Spots of Time,” the Fragment and the Autobiography 1367
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Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 47. For Derrida, the
genre of autobiography is seductive and “poisonous” precisely because of the
possibility of reversing “an immunizing movement” into “auto-immunizing”
one: he defines autobiography as “the writing of the self as living, the trace of
the living for itself, being for itself, the auto-affection or auto-infection as
memory or archive of the living” (47). Earlier than this, Derrida provided his
account of autobiographical writing that occurs in all texts: “It is rather para-
doxical to think of an autobiography whose signature is entrusted to the other,
one who comes along so late and is so unknown. . . . Every text answers to this

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of the whole, a situation that resonates with Schlegel’s comment: “In
poetry too every whole can be a part and every part really a whole”
(Critical Fragments 14). “There was a Boy” of The Prelude (1805: V.
389-422) and “Nutting” were intended as a part of that unwritten longer
work but were included as separate poems in the 1800 edition of The