Pierre Senges

Senges is a bright light: someone who can write fiction that is novel in form but also rejects the tiresome cliches of most literature that is novel in form (really, we're all alone in this world and love will save us? You don't say, well, I'm really looking forward to pondering that at the end of your 900 page opus). Here, he gives us a 'history' of people trying to put some order into the notebooks of Georg Lichtenberg, and some passages supposedly by Lichtenberg, and a biography, of show more sorts, of Lichtenberg, and the stories told by the people trying to put the notebooks into order, which are mostly parodies or pastiches of well-known stories, and the stories of the people putting those notebooks in order by telling stories, and Senges winds all of this together to tell the history, intellectual and otherwise, of the twentieth century, while defending a number of values that have been fairly undefended since Lichtenberg died and romanticism became the go-to standpoint of most people (let's all empathize with the down-and-out indiviualist hero standing up revolutionarily against the man! but without thinking about it too much, because thinking is bad for you!)

It's also beautifully written, massively digressive, and way too much to take it at once.

So, I love it. Here are some pull-quotes.

"He's worried about the next century, or even the next two, when men, out of a sense of propriety, will forbid themselves the use of irony,a nd will find it natural to have masters: they'll be admirers, they'll collect busts, the busts of poets, the busts of generals and heads of state, it makes no difference: men with so little confidence in their own ironic natures, considering their expression to be a crime (an incongruity, a breach of good manners) that ought to be replaced by deference."

"(glory to that which gives itself to be understood, a curse on that which is satisfied with merely existing, a thousand curses on that which tries to keep deeds and facts away from interpreters and interpretations: they're more miserable than a pair of Vandals, who tear a ciborium from a priest's hands to use it as a spittoon.)"

"Romanticism is flourishing almost everywhere, but you, Georg Christoph, you stick to your old-fashioned rationalism, you continue to prefer reason over emotion, persuaded that even though reason may lead to emotion, emotion never leads to reason. And while Goethism is decorating all of Europe with its flowers--pomp, sentimentalism, dilettantism in science, good morals in politics--you refuse to change, you refuse both the flowers and Goethe, his paper lanterns and the streamers: you prefer the intelligence of Jonathan Swift, which resembles two jaws clamped over a live mouse; so don't be surprised if your neighbors, some of them, remove your name from their address books."

And the entirety of the final twenty pages.

NB: very, very poor proofreading. Dalkey Archive, if you're out there, I'll proofread this stuff for you, and all I need, payment wise, is books. show less

I assume that everyone wishes literature were just vituperative rants saturated in scholastic detail, but devoid of characters, plot, and description. Voila. The Major Refutation, written by Antonio de Guevara to his confessee, Charles I of Ghent, later Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, reveals to us that the discovery of the New World was a fraud perpetrated by more or less everyone other than Antonio himself: the Catholic monarchs, the merchants, the slave-owners, the goldsmiths, the Jews show more (though Antonio understands that they're sinned against, rather than sinning), the explorers, and most of all Antonio's arch-nemesis, Peter Martyr. Essential: Bernhard writing in the 16th century.

Pierre Senges has done us the favor of translating it into French, and adding a scholarly epilogue on the many other great lost books and revelations of fraud in literary history. And then Jacob Siefring has done an excellent job putting Senges' French into English. The book is a wonderful take-down of the Age of Exploration, and therefore also of the New World supposedly discovered during that age, and therefore also of the 'Old' World that glutted itself on potatoes and tomatoes and gold and slaves. Since the Old and New Worlds are both as existent as they ever were, it's also eerily relevant.

The whole thing is worth reading, though I have more than a few questions for Siefring: in English, this really is like a more oratorical Bernhard; was the French more authentically 16th century? Are the anachronisms, winked at in Senges's epilogue, Senges's fault, or Siefring's, or intentional on one or both their parts?

But I have no questions about the worth of reading the book. The project itself, the skeptical assault on events we know to have been real, is genuinely discomforting. Readers of texts like this tend to pride ourselves on our skepticism and our doubting; here, the skepticism is gloriously productive of insults and scorn, and the insults and scorn are often well-deserved, but ultimately we, the readers, know that the skepticism was misplaced. Is ours, too, misplaced?

"When faced with a lie, every man thinks it his duty to pronounce the truth, and believes that he just as soon dissolves it, just as Christ with a single word drove off the demon, composed of sarcasm and sulphur; when faced with liars, every man yearns to crack open the safes of the secretaries and sift through the documents, because he eagerly awaits the triumph, tardy perhaps but nonetheless effective, of experts and jurists over boasters and sham sailors, bona fide bastards and speculators... truth has the disadvantage of being prudent, circumspect, and of keeping quiet as silence is its least impure form... and adumbration fails when it comes face-to-face with the lie, the lie being sprightly, performative, incontestable as a blemish, and possessing the authority of a tocsin or call to prayer."

On the one hand, you want to quote that to every Trump voter you meet. On the other hand, it was written by a man who was, sincerely or not, lying through his teeth. show less

What a wonderful concept---and a likewise deft execution. I was often floored by this delightful romp. The Adventure takes the proverbial chimp and a typewriter as its point of departure. Harboring hopes of Shakespeare in age where the Flesh is made manifest in a Cartesian universe, Senges finds the best of Calvino in a cubist traverse across myriad variations on a theme. The theme being couched in a paradox, much like the best of Chesterton or Borges, that infinite variation will never find show more the Sublime, unless of course another Continental by the name of Menard is adding his salt to the soup.


The joys of the prehensile are explored as are the minatory possibilities thereof. Other themes explored are the triumph of the vegetative, the antipodal reality of the crepuscular and the primary pleasure of the fermented beverage, great be its name.


I loved this book and it is now offered in paperback at a less than prohibitive cost. Everyone raise a glass to the fall of Scott Walker and rush out and read this tale for the better of our body politic. show less

What is a Fragment?

I bought this book as part of a reading project on the relation between very long forms of fiction (thousand-page novels, or at least five-hundred page ones, like this one, which are dense with citations, marginal notes, and multiple voices) and very short forms (such as aphorisms, including Chamfort's, Rochefoucauld's, Nietzsche's, and Lichtenberg's, and also Ben Lerner's poems on Lichtenberg, and Alexander Kluge's text on Lerner's text on Lichtenberg).

This is a complex show more book, with about 150 short chapters, each titled, arranged in several sequences. Actual aphorisms by Lichtenberg are in the text and in the margins, always identified by number:

"[J 1842] I must write in order to learn to appreciate on my own the extent of the chaos within me." (p. 76, margin)

The body text presents itself as a narrative about the life and reception of Lichtenberg. Most chapters are written by an unnamed narrator; a couple, headed "Lichtenberg speaks," are presented as if written by Lichtenberg.

1. Why the book is not an historical novel

In Michael Orthofer's words, the book is

"difficult to categorize. Dalkey Archive Press (accurately) presents the English translation as 'Fiction' (in its 'French Literature Series'), but its Dewey class identification number (838.609) will lead dutiful librarians to shelve it somewhere in Goethe's vicinity, on the historical literature shelves; the Library of Congress classification (PT2423.L4 Z91313) puts it similarly deep in German-literature territory, rather than in the contemporary French literature section -- subject-matter apparently prevailing over form." (from The Complete Review, www.complete-review.com)

But it is hardly true, as Orthofer concludes, that "the picture of Lichtenberg readers are left with is likely a more complete one of the man and his work than can be found in any traditional (or other fictional) biography." And it's hardly the case that the material is "mined to its very ends."

Lichtenberg published five books and a number of essays in his lifetime, and almost none of that is in Senges's book, with the exception of some traces of Lichtenberg's text on Hogarth. Lichtenberg's science is alluded to many times, but also basically not described. Senges used a French translation of the aphorisms, and he seems to have very little interest in Lichtenberg's science or his other interests. It's not a book to read if you're hoping to learn about Lichtenberg. "Fiction" is the correct classification.

Most of the novel is a succession of stories, all invented, about people who tried to assemble the fragments in his "Waste Books," believing they were the remains of a "Grand Novel." Senges imagines two centuries' worth of work, a study center, and a half-dozen indvidual scholars (Leonid Pliachine, Zoltan Kiforgat, Christina Walser, Mary Mulligan), and he tells us at length about their theories. Those scholars and their hypothetical books are the real characters in "Fragments of Lichtenberg."

2. Fragment and whole in "Fragments of Lichtenberg"

I was hoping, I suppose, for a meditation on the difference between Lichtenberg's notes (he did not call them aphorisms) and the clearly encyclopedic ambitions of Senges's narrative. But Senges has a simple notion of both the aphorism that prevents any real engagement. He only quotes about 200 of Lichtenberg's thousands of notes. There are about 10,000 in all (see the German Wikipedia for Sudelbücher), and according to the translator, Senges used a French translation that has about 2,000. They range from sentence fragments to longer notes, but Senge prefers them all the same size, about the length of the one I quoted.

The conceit of the book is that Lichtenbergians thought that they were the remains of an enormous novel, and in particular that Lichtenberg had burned the novel, leaving only 1/10 of it in the form of his notes, which he then collected. (It's ridiculously improbable, given that almost none of the notes read as fragments of a novel -- there's no dialogue, for example, and no characters -- and that Lichtenberg himself kept his notebooks, one for each letter of the alphabet, so he would have had to write a novel, burn it, collect the fragments, and assemble them into supposedly chronological notebooks.)

That conceit permits Senges to imagine books that Lichtenberg might have written, and it allows him to tell, in a fragmented way, the stories of Lichtenberg's self-appointed editors over the centuries. In other words many of the 150 or so short chapters in "Fragments of Lichtenberg" are themselves fragments of about a half-dozen stories about the scholars. But that sort of fragmentation is really only division and rearrangement: it isn't a cutting, across the grain of grammar and sense, as in the best of Lichtenberg's aphorisms. Senges has one of his characters propose that Lichtenberg's fragments are like islands in an archipelago, and the oceanic spaces between are the lost texts: it's a metaphor very much in line with the original Sudelbücher, but not at all in line with "Fragments of Lichtenberg," which is continuous and uniformly expressive and comprehensible despite its 150 chapters. (p. 65)

The narrative runs in a fluid, fluent fashion, without any letup, for all of the book's 500 pages, and the result is a strong contrast between the dense, obdurate quotations from Lichtenberg and the author's watery prose. Here is an example among hundreds. Two of Lichtenberg's fragments are insert in a sentence that runs blithely on past them:

"...the foreheads of the Lichtenbergians are all nicely wrinkled: between [Lichtenberg's aphorism] 'One of our ancestors must have read the forbidden book' [D 339] and [his aphorism] 'Flies have mated in the hollow of my ear' [L 555], there might [have originally have been] a hundred and twenty pages of shipwreck, capture, and salvation, filled with duels and stampedes, a pastor's monologue, and the complaints of a chambermaid..." (p. 45)

Senges can't help himself: he needs to list every Baroque possibility he can, and the result is a cavalcade of supposedly learned, superficially "encyclopedic" information. But the happy torrent of Senges's references is at stark odds with the weirdness and seriousness of Lichtenberg's thoughts. Aphorisms are embedded in this book like ugly spiders frozen in floods of amber.

"Fragments of Lichtenberg" evades the more interesting problem of the disjunction between Lichtenberg's 10,000 unattachable, irrecuperable fragments, and Senges's superficially fragmented but actually quite well-ordered book. As I read I went through a phase of skipping ahead to read Lichtenberg (his fragments are always in italics in the translation, and often in the margins), because I was getting less and less from Senges's prose, but I was always rewarded by the strangeness of Lichtenberg's thoughts. It only makes matters worse that Senges sometimes ends his brief chapters with lines that he must think function like aphorisms. A chapter called "Lichtenberg speaks" (one of several in his voice) ends: "in fact, sometimes it's my hump that does the dictating." (Lichtenberg was hunch-backed.) (p. 71). That pales next to the Lichtenberg aphorism that's quoted in the margin of the facing page:

"[L 972] I believe that man is ultimately so free that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be disputed."

What an amazing compression of ironies, so distant from Senges's simple paraphrase of Lichtenberg's thoughts on his deformity. At one point Senges quotes Lichtenberg's fragment B 232: "Imagination and fantasy must be used with caution, like any corrosive substance." (p. 381) It seems Senges did not notice this implicit indictment of his own project: despite every attempt to let his imagination and fantasy run on, he has produced a book that is not "corrosive" at all. It's oblivious, often, to the acid in its subject's heart, to the willfulness that resulted in 10,000 "notes" that could never be synthesized, to the attraction Lichtenberg felt toward things that do not fit, that do not exist in endless chains of trite Baroque associations (shipwrecks, pastors, chambermaids).

I don't see this as a book on Lichtenberg. I also don't see it as a book on the contrast between encyclopedic excess and aphoristic taciturnity, except inadvertently, in the continuous contrast between Lichtenberg's sharp insights and Senges's fluvial prose.

*

(Incidentally, a lot of what passes as erudite allusions is, I think, more the result of Google searches. Internet-style scholarship abounds, for instance when the narrator happens to remember the sequence of pieces in a suite ["the intoxication of the prelude-allemande-courante-minuet-gigue variety"] or the number of blades in a Swiss Army knife [twenty-seven]. [p. 291]) Nor is there much engagement with the actual complexity of the real Baroque encyclopedias, which are rebarbatively intricate in comparison to the flow of stories in this book. Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" is mentioned in passing, and so is Pierre Bayle. But actual Baroque encyclopedias are as distant from Senges's encyclopedism as he is distant from Lichtenberg. This is a firmly 21st century book, not in the sense that it has something new to say about part and whole, fragment and long form, but rather in the sense that it knows its 18th century through the internet.) show less