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 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.… (more)

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 (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.… (more)

The literary remains of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg include a series of notebooks, known as the "Waste Books", that consist of hundreds of aphorisms linked only by Lichtenberg's ironic philosophy and sharp observations. It is known that he wrote them in hopes of creating a novel, but that novel was never completed.

This novel imagines a group of scholars, "the Lichtenbergians", whose purpose is to assemble the fragments and uncover Lichtenberg's masterpiece. Various attempts are described: Noah's Ark, Punchinello, Ovid's return to Rome, and a retelling of Dafoe's Robinson Caruso. Along with these attempts, the lives of the Lichtenbergians and vignettes from Lichtenberg's life are presented in a seemingly endless series of short chapters.

I've been looking forward to reading this book since I first learned that Daley Archive were publishing it a few years ago. Now that it's finally out, it goes a long way to meeting my expectations. However, whether due to the vagaries of translation or shortcomings in the original, I found it a bit disappointing: the wit is a bit stale, the erudition limited, the verbosity overwrought.

Still, I would much rather spend my time reading an ambitious work with a flawed execution such as this than the tedious perfection of the unadventurous pablum that passes for literary fiction these days.… (more)

While there are a few contenders left, Fragments might prove to be my favorite book of the year. Infinitely idiosyncratic, Pierre Senges assembled not just a palace from Lichtenberg but a protean atlas thereof. Oozing-beyond-rich erudition delights each page. References dance in an angelic choreography, the ideas of fragmentation and assembly move to the fore and then pirouette outward in bemused orbits as the text itself follows the efforts of various Lichtenberg specialists as they ponder the fate of the “missing” elements from the 18C eccentric polymath. A rough consensus forms that the surviving aphorisms must have been part of a larger text, the specialists lean towards a novel. But what novel, what sort? Nothing strictly like Casanova for Lichtenberg was hunchbacked and his phrases aim toward invention: both literary and scientific.

The wayward adventures of Punchinello are constructed from the extant aphorisms. My only wish in this delightful section was that the character had stayed in Russia longer than the three allotted pages.

Other options explored regard Ovid’s Black Sea exile and a Rousseau filtered Robinson Crusoe. Each gloss is spectacular even in translation.

Gogol features late in the work and one could gauge the remaining trajectory. I thought about Gogol last night watching Equinox Flower, the camera pausing on the cross adorning the hospital asked certain questions. Gogol here is rather a shorthand for religious madness and the opinion of tossing one’s words into the flames.
… (more)