« Getting back to tough eternal verities » ? Cyril Connolly et la pensée du fragment dans The Unquiet Grave

• Main Author: Jean-Christophe Murat
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2010-06-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: C. Connolly; Horizon; Montaigne; essay; figure; fragment
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/3205

The Unquiet Grave is the “major” work of a “minor” author who is mostly remembered as editor of Horizon in the 1940s. Defying all attempts at classification, the book derives from an aesthetics of the fragmentary, with the first three parts consisting of juxtaposed paragraphs, so concise at times that they can be read as epigrams or aphorisms. In the preface to the 1950 edition, Connolly defines the work as a mosaic, claiming that beyond its surface disorder a perfectly coherent figure can subsequent ly be made out, within which each fragment has its own particular, and specific place. The remark begs the question of who exactly the author is, considering that quotation is being used as a mode of composition. Connolly’s own literary, sentimental and political identity crisis prompts him to identify with a whole series of literary figures that show not only how ideas from the Continent come to weigh on the author’s reflections and self-reflections, but also how, to misquote Shakespeare, others are such stuff as he is made on. All things considered, The Unquiet Grave excels in the art of the quirky essay.