Fragments of Lichtenberg

by Pierre Senges, Gregory Flanders (Translator)

The eighteenth-century German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg left behind at the time of his death thousands of fragmentary notes commenting on a dazzling and at the same time puzzling array of subjects. Pierre Senges’s Fragments of Lichtenberg imaginatively and hilariously reconstructs the efforts of scholars across three centuries to piece together Lichtenberg’s disparate notes into a coherent philosophical or artistic statement. What emerges instead from their efforts are a wide variety of conflicting and competing Lichtenbergs – the poet, the physicist, the philosopher, the humorist – and a very funny meditation on the way interpretations and speculation create new histories and new realities.

Genres: Fiction, France, Literature, Novels, Philosophy

640 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2008

About the author

Pierre Senges (born 1968, Romans-sur-Isère) is a French writer. His work includes fifteen books, often collaborations with illustrators, and over twenty-five plays for radio.
His books are sometimes noted for having a baroque style. They frequently combine erudition and invention Fragments of Lichtenberg or play with the relation between the true and untrue Veuves au maquillage and La réfutation majeure.
Senges' radio plays (fictions radiophoniques) have been produced by France Culture and France Inter. His many prizes include the Prix Wepler, the Prix SACD Nouveau Talent Radio in 2007, the Grand prix de la fiction radiophonique de la SGDL in 2008, the Prix du deuxième roman, the Prix Rhône-Alpes, and the Prix meilleure page 111.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and writer of aphorisms. His ridicule of metaphysical and romantic excesses is remarkable.
Pierre Senges creates his own fictional history of this original scholar’s scrapbooks… And in this chronicle Georg Christoph’s figure becomes more colossal than that of Baron Munchausen… And he begins with obsequies… Goethe, surrounded by all kinds of doctors, is on his deathbed…

They wanted satisfaction and they would accept no substitute: the master of Weimar bestowed his final words upon them, two syllables, and what syllables they were: Mehr (and then, a moment later) Licht – before passing away for good and turning dark gray in the space of a minute: who would have believed it?

Mehr Licht – More light… And to shed more light on the existing order of things is a task of every great book… However the popular anecdote maintains that the Meister wished to say Mehr Lichtenberg but was short of breath… The tone is set and the fanciful narrative continues… Everything begins with childbirth…

…at around five in the morning, three square inches of pink flesh appear through the opening – a few minutes later, the screams of the mother have ceased and those of the baby begin: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg appears to have a particular interest in the vowels a or i – his parents rejoice: the child is born.

And everything ends with death… For the individual but not for his patrimony… Lichtenberg left to his posterity eight thousand handwritten fragments of his mind…

Like it or not, as far as the Lichtenberg fragments go, the line from one sentence to the next is never a straight, but a drunken one, with plenty of room for hesitations, deceptions, the worst kinds of speculation or haggling, the ramblings of paranoid men, jealous lovers, or saviors – there’s even room, as we’ve already seen, for Saint Anthony himself.

And such fragments as “Flies have mated in the hollow of my ear” or “God, who winds our sundials” truly make our imagination work…
The world needs its eccentrics. Who else can see reality in a new light?

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Well then I guess to continue the saga begun below and read backwords (if you've not been following this saga afore this day), I'll type out the veryvery tinytiny print found on the copyright page which must serve as some clue to the unbearable delay in bringing this novel to your readerly eyes ::

Despite its mission to support French literature in translation, and in particular to to [sic!] support the cause and well-being of translators, CNL (Centre national du livre) would not provide support for the translator of this book, and this at a time when there has been a substantial decrease in the number of books being translated into English. Dalkey Archive urges CNL to return to its mission of aiding translators.

Which, fair enough. But, again, I want to call out Dalkey Archive too to cleave to its own mission to keep the novels it publishes in print in perpetuity. I say this with all the gentleness of understanding the vicissitudes involved in keeping BURIED books alive.

At any rate, this review is pretty much been a preview and that's just fine with me. I will say however that Pierre Senges is The Real Deal. Aside from that claim, I've just got one thing to say and that is to quote what I'd said in my comments about Benjamin's Arcades Project. "Meanwhile, The Arcades Project offers the aspiring novelist, and by novelist one must mean the innovative experimental sui generis type who finds formal clues in non-fictive genre, a whole new world of formal possibilities for that Next Great Novel." This is precisely what Senges has done in his Fragments of Lichtenberg. And gosh darnit, ain't it a wonder!


_______
2.5 years later, a reality. On my shelf. Damn thing's a legend by now. Better be good. Of course if you still don't Believe the Hype --> check out The Major Refutation of the New World Hype, cuz you know the Moon Landing was a Hoax too.


_________
Summore Updat'in.

Well, winging on its wing my=way is the very latest Senges, which is not this Senges but ::
The Major Refutation. Freshly translated. By Jacob Siefring.

But the other update is :: this thing about four other books forthish coming or something. (c=below of this Review for Link). And two of them seem to be also winging their way upon the wing into the English of your native tongue. Check it out ::
The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère, trans'd by John Lambert(?) [March 7 of 17]
&
Radiant Terminus by Antoine Volodine, trans'd by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Open Letter [Feb Fourteen of Seventeen].

At anyrate, as translations, they'll be still=born. So have your SHOVELs at the ready.



___________
UPADATE :: quell the bitterness? Possible new pub date from Dalkey? Jan. 27, 2017? amazon is confirming.


___________
I'm still bitter about this.

But Jacob Siefring is pouring forth the Senges translations (I've not read them yet, but I want you to know about them because I know how bitter you too are with Dalkey about this mess). Here's ::-->>>

Geometry in the Dust, an excerpt
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/geomet...


_________
Thanks Dalkey! for dropping this book into oblivion. Where the f...?



____________
Also from Senges, forthcoming in French, a FANFIC about Ahab from that one whale=novel, Achab (Sequelles) (Ahab (Aftermath)). Still from The Untranslated ::
"it is about the fate of Captain Ahab after his last encounter with the white whale narrated at the end of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Senges’ Ahab tries to capitalise on his tragic experiences by attempting to sell his story first as a musical on the Broadway, and then as a script for a Hollywood movie."
https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com...

________________
Thank you Dalkey! The Millions gives me so paltry what to look forward to this second half of this year of our lord 2014. Here's a fat french encyclopedic something. I dunno. But check the thing at The Untranslated :: http://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/...

And also, at the same site, is this thing about four other books forthish coming or something. Whatever :: http://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/...

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Senges’s swanking maximalist opus has on paper all the elements that make me spasm: a colossal erudition on show, an astonishing felicity with language, a shamelessly rococo prose style somewhat Therouvian, an hilarious swatting of cacademics, an abundance of lists ranging from obscure to obscuriouser, a continuous skewering of the fake and the real, a lot of fun with marginalia, and a dry, satirical sense of humour. This novel has those elements in superabundance. So, horrified reader, the reason for this lukewarm three-star rating? THERE IS TOO MUCH OF EVERYTHING MAKES MY BRAIN HURT. Every other paragraph spirals into long digressive arcane ramblings, often to the point where the meaning is lost, or into ref-stuffed sentences that spiral on and on into more terms and research in a beefed-up baroque pastiche that is not always welcomingly clever. Perhaps Fragments of Lichtenberg, if the intention is to skewer the world of cacademic verbiage and obsessive pedantry, ends up falling in love with its world, and as a result, revels in the stirring up of theories, fake histories, and self-adoring sentences, and kicks the reader to the kerb. But, more likely, the reason for the three-star rating is I am a nitwit. You know this review is only making you wetter.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The whole man must move together – everything in a man must move towards the same end.

-George Christoph Lichtenberg (The Waste Books, Notebook B)

[and]

If it permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read

(Notebook F)

To begin, let’s look at what exactly the titular “Fragments” actually are, and examine the historic starting place as to why Senges has written the book he has written. I’m going to – entirely out of laziness – copy and paste from Wikipedia here:

The "scrapbooks" (Sudelbücher in German) are the notebooks he kept from his student days until the end of his life. Each volume was accorded a letter of the alphabet from A, which begun in 1765, to L, which broke off at Lichtenberg's death in 1799.

These notebooks first became known to the world after the man's death, when the first and second editions of Lichtenbergs Vermischte Schriften (1800–06 and 1844–53) were published by his sons and brothers. Since the initial publications, however, notebooks G and H, and most of notebook K, were destroyed or disappeared. Those missing parts are believed to have contained sensitive materials. The manuscripts of the remaining notebooks are now preserved in Göttingen University.

The notebooks contain quotations that struck Lichtenberg, titles of books to read, autobiographical sketches, and short or long reflections. Those reflections helped Lichtenberg earn his posthumous fame. Today, he is regarded as one of the best aphorists in Western intellectual history.

Some scholars have attempted to distil a system of thought out of Lichtenberg's scattered musings. However, Lichtenberg was not a professional philosopher, and had no need to present, or to have, any consistent philosophy.

(bolding mine)

Interestingly enough, there is an indication in Lichtenberg’s writings that there is an expectation for these “fragments” to be assembled into a cohesive whole:

Merchants have a Waste-book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch, I think it is in German) in which they enter from day to day everything they have bought and sold, all mixed up together in disorder, from this it is transferred to the journal, in which everything is arranged more systematically, and finally it arrives in the ledger, in double entry after the Italian manner of book-keeping. . .This deserves to be imitated by the scholar. First a book in which I inscribe everything just as I see it or as my thoughts prompt me, then this can be transferred to another where the materials are more ordered and segregated, and the ledger can then contain a connected construction and the elucidation of the subject that flows from it expressed in an orderly fashion. (Notebook E)

Of course, that overall idea is simple conceit, just an idle thought on the part of Lichtenberg – but Senges runs with it here, and from these fragments creates an encyclopedic work of cohesive brilliance.

Now, Senges is not simply interested in creating a work from the scattered thoughts and musings of Lichtenberg – he is instead working towards a faux-scholarship surrounding the invented efforts of fictioanal scholars over the course of two centuries where they attempt to create a massive whole – an Ur-Text from which the fragments as we know them originated.

Fragmentation Pervades

One could make an argument that this book can be divided [fragmented] into three distinct sections – pieces about Lichtenberg, pieces about the history of the Lichtenbergians, and pieces about the varied Ur-texts that the Lichtenbergians assembled. Unsurprisingly, these sections are fragmented and dispersed throughout the book itself. The sections regarding Lichtenberg himself are fairly straightforward – excepting maybe the fragmented sections dedicated to the growing of his hunchback and its varied meanings – while the fictional Lichtenbergian sections are considerably more complex. The history of the Lichtenbergians are marked with schism [fragmentation], disagreements, and the interruption of (and scattering force of fragmentation that is) history*.

*Something that Senges weaves into the work – and it’s one of my favorite parts of the work – is the pervasive notion that our knowledge – that of humanity as a whole – is derived through multiple fragmentations and rebuildings of texts and ideas: there is a ludicrousness in the actions and leaps of logic the Lichtenbergians employ in their de-fragmentation of Lichtenberg’s Notebooks, but Senges weaves the idea throughout the text that our knowledge has been lost and rebuilt many times, and while we might not think we make the same leaps as the Lichtenbergians, there is a certain amount of faith implicit in our cohesive weaving of understanding and knowledge (every time fire appears in the text it represents a fragmentation and loss of source material that will need to be re-constructed).

A great deal more attention needs to be paid to the sections specifically dedicated to the reconstruction of the notebooks themselves. To begin, Senges takes a step back and examines how a work of cohesive wholeness can become fragmented to begin with. There are a number of humorous brainstormings as to how Lichtenberg could have taken his theoretical Ur-Text and fragmented it into the notebooks as they currently exist. From there the re-building begins. It begins with the simple notion that notebooks must be re-organized to form a cohesive whole. But, the notebooks themselves appear to assert that the final work itself was mostly burned by Lichtenberg, and that maybe one-tenth of the final work (a massive roman-fleuve) remains, and that work has, in addition to being significantly reduced, also been fragmented. From there the reconstruction of the work begins to take shape – an exploration of what framework must be utilized for the work as a whole is undertaken – and it is eventually decided that the work is a massive retelling of the Punchinello sequences. Many page are dedicated to the re-construction of this work – complete with side-note references to the text of the notebooks themselves – until another breakthrough occurs: the reconstruction up until now is incorrect, and the overall work that has been done until now is actually three distinct works. So, we begin the fragmentation process anew (and the fragmentations of these three works proceed as one would expect) – where a new Ur-Text has overwritten the original Ur-Text as a palimpsest, and the fragmentation of that Ur-Text will likely lead to a new set of fragments for scholars to examine, and begin reconstructing themselves. And thus it goes, on and on.

The closing pages of the book are pitch-perfect, a testament to the skill with which Senges brings to the composition as a whole – for all of its fragmentation, for all of its constantly building complexities, Senges has written it all with one epiphanic end in sight, and the framework becomes visible as the reader hits the homestretch, and the details fill in to their prescribed places, and in the final paragraph everything clicks into place, everything as it should be, all meta-textual fragments re-constructed, crystalline in their precision of place.

[Chris Via]

Talking about Fragments of Lichtenberg , Falstaff: Apotheosis , Studies of Silhouettes , and Rabelais's Doughnuts in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaNrC...

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

As we read Georg Christian Lichtenberg’s aphorisms, our curiosity takes two paths: what comes before and after these thoughts seemingly snipped out of some peculiar train of thought, and what do they mean?

Pierre Senges has a creative curiosity raised to the nth degree (Lichtenberg was a mathematician, and mathematical ideas pervade the Fragments) so he posits a once-massive work by Lichtenberg of which the aphorisms are only the debris from a destructive blaze of the full document, deliberately set by the playful, ironic lightning expert Lichtenberg to pose a posthumous puzzle for his eventual readers. How would one order these aphorisms in such a ‘missing’ book, and imagine the missing pieces, to make sense of observations as disparate as I must write in order to learn to appreciate on my own the extent of the chaos within me. and Here lie the potatoes, waiting for their resurrection?

Then, since this is really a book about writing and reading, Senges doubles down and explodes his idea. We have an Alfred-Nobel endowed institute in Gothenburg that funds scholars and laypeople around the globe, who spend their lives sorting and rearranging the Lichtenberg fragments to construct the lost book. And shortly two devotees declare that there are actually three novels, not one, lying behind the hypothetical total of 8.000 total fragments.

Because each reader creates his or her own edition of any book (the real vision behind Fragments of Lichtenberg, I think), no matter how much or how little an author provides, there are then seemingly an infinite number of possible books to be imagined out of the 1,000 aphorisms / fragments we actually have. Except that to give some structure to his 450 pages, Senges has the institute’s members accept a theory that Lichtenberg must have written some ironic parody or version of a well known work or character.

So the global scriveners propose novels based on Punchinello escaping from commedia, or a pampered mamma’s boy as Robinson Crusoe, or Ovid returning from exile, or a Church Council of Pamplona to reach judgment on an erotic simile of Christopher Columbus’s, and so on (even a Disneyfied Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, part of the fun). These are described in the multitudinous chapters and the detailed, integral Table of Contents. But sooner or later another devotee baulks at the appropriation of certain fragments into one of these reconstructed novels (because the fragment isn’t available for the ’novel’ he’s working on), so it is thrown over and another layperson with another hobbyhorse starts picking over the fragments to fit into his or her proposal for an alternative novel of literary history.

Senges sends us down these fragment-novel estuaries as they are partially shaped by the events and literary movements of the twentieth century, but not in any straightforward manner. He interweaves with the potential-novel summaries an imaginative life of Lichtenberg, not too constrained by ‘reality’, as well as the operations of the Gothenburg Institute and its far-flung correspondents. (The literary movements of Paris take some hits along the way. And the Swedish scholars must accommodate some gentle fun at their expense.) The complex layout of the pages incorporates notes and relevant (?) Lichtenberg aphorisms in the side margins as well.

--Who would get rid of what he can destroy?
--It is impossible to truly know whether, at this moment, we are not sitting in a madhouse.
--On the transsubstantiation of eau-de-vie using a compass and a ruler.

And what holds all this together? The charm, humility, humor and ironic enjoyment of life, of Georg Christian Lichtenberg. Refusing to look at his hump back as a burden, he goes about his ‘small’ life as a university mathematics professor interested in all of nature, an obsessive hypochondriac, and above all a humanist. In part the book is an examination of real distortion and true upright character.

So much for the surface ‘what is it about?”. The form is metafictional and very creative, and the content teems with authors, books, politicians, mathematicians, artists, etc from every time period. Some are treated with the same respect and enthusiasm as Senges gives to Lichtenstein (e.g. Hogarth), while others are roasted with glee. If you are a Goethe fan, this will be a tough read, as the sage of Weimar is pilloried at many turns: a superficial, pompous, turgid, overrated, stuffed prig. Since Elective Affinities left me with the same impression, I totally enjoyed it. (Of course, you have to have a loose sense of history, since Lichtenstein repeatedly refers to Faust, which wasn’t published until after his death.)

You may be turning to reference books repeatedly to learn or refresh your memory on various authors or books, and you will undoubtedly add to your ‘to read’ list. I had to stop in the middle and sample Baron Munchausen, (which led serendipitously to a library copy of Krzhizhanovsky’s The Return of Munchausen). Who is Abbt? Was there a Council of Pamplona? Yes, but not when Senges places it. Religion, faith and mysticism play tag team, and many (American) readers will need brief reminders (e.g. Meister Eckart). Speaking of which, this is a very European book.

In short, I absolutely loved this book. I loved its lightheartedness, its erudition and creativity, and it’s absolute commitment to a humanistic, open, positive approach to life. We should all be a large a person as the humpbacked Lichtenberg, and as creative in our reading as Senges.

One final comment, one of my usual ‘serendipitous almost simultaneous read’ observations. I recently finished Compass by Mathias Énard. It is also packed with erudition and a thousand authors, and written by a Frenchman, and I loved it. But so different: Énard’s characters are constantly traveling, engaged with the ‘Orient’, obsessed with but inept at love, and discontented. One of Senges’s/Lichtenberg’s themes is comparison, and comparing these two densely-referential novels is quite interesting.

[Jim Elkins]

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 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. Senges knows that Lichtenberg's fragments are just that -- pieces, not taken from an original whole, and not likely to be united into a coherent whole -- but his prose flows blithely on around the amazing aphorisms, for hundreds of pages, as if a 21st-century kind of encyclopedism can frame and even nourish texts that are alien to it at every point.

*

(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.)

[Geoff]

Hey Dalkey, I know yer out there - where the hell is this!? Get on it suckas!

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fragmentary, scattered oeuvre cast as the Book of the World, inexhaustible in its hermeneutic possibilities — such is the premise of Pierre Senges’ maximalist, Shandean romp through the imagined history of a Lichtenberg society seeking to reconstruct the hypothetical, singular Urtext of their namesake.

The structure of Fragments may be summarized according to Coleridge’s useful distinction between ‘Imagination’, the blaze which inaugurates the Gestalt idea of the text, and ‘Fancy’, the faculty of free play which elaborates in detail the unfolding of the announced situation. Lichtenberg’s aphorisms are thus employed as a sort of Imaginative framework governing the articulation of Fanciful interpretations: a fragment on the torrent of rain located within the context of a "Noah’s Ark" reading of Lichtenberg’s oeuvre; another, on the passing of time, seen through the lens of a proposed Malfilâtre novel. This is commensurate with the strategy of Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi, which similarly marshals a logical architecture as scaffolding for the flight of Fancy (and so too does Senges share Perec’s tendency of meticulous cataloging and enumeration).

It may be criticized that these interpretative narratives only obliquely, if not arbitrarily reference their respective aphorisms (printed adjacently in the margins of the text)—in many such cases, the relation between narrative and aphorism is all but undetectable, rendering the fictional interpretation more of a story unto itself than one bearing relation to some larger schema. This may, however, be alternatively viewed as a means of heightening the absurdity of these interpretations for comedic effect, corroborated when, towards the end of the novel, Senges explicitly satirizes the questionably eccentric readings present in certain schools of contemporary literary theory by casting them alongside his.

Regardless of how tangible their links to Lichtenberg’s corpus may be, the obsessively Baroque narrative readings (which roughly trace a history of Western literature through the ages) are immensely engaging in their own respect, augmented by a slew of Burton-esque witticisms, asides, and ruminations. Fragments is therefore best approached as a OuLiPian textual play, one which celebrates the infinitude of imagination, the finitude of literary existence.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Howard Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece from the best French novelist going today. Mathematician, physics teacher, hermit, electricity enthusiast, womanizer, hypochondriac Georg Christoph Lichtenberg left behind 8,000 fragments long considered mere aphorisms. However, certain scholars claim that these famous "Wastebooks" are actually remnants of a lost Great Novel that might be reconstructed. Their attempts to do so and their grappling with Lichtenberg's legacy are this book. Warm, absurd, generous, erudite, hilarious. You will not regret giving this a try.

[Noah]

This review is a surrender report, which I don’t think I’ve done before. Fragments of Lichtenberg is something of a Drama of Humanism, written from inside the walls of the compound Literature. It was not funny to me, but is marketed as funny. On each page someone is mentioned from the Humanist tradition. This book is only recommended for someone much more intelligent than me in a way that will surely help with little, which is furthermore liable to create severe problems for the bearer in romance and at the pearly gates.

[Daniel Polansky]

I read this book.

[!Tæmbuŝu]

Reviewed by The Complete Review

[Brooke Salaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entertaining at times mystifying tale of 18th century physicist, author, hypochondriac, gibbous, free-spirit Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Seems to be an intermingling of fact, speculation and outright fantasy in retelling pieces of Lichtenberg’s life and the description of 100 years of Lichtenberg sleuthing and various attempts to fill in the gaps and reconstitute his oeuvre as a single story of widely disparate plots and themes. Dandy Robinson, an effete castaway in a recounting of the Defoe tale; the 8th dwarf who engineers his escape from the boring predictability of life with Snow White and the other seven; a council meeting of religious figures discussing Christopher Columbus’ description of the shape of the earth as that of a woman’s breast, among several other flights of fantasy that clearly take huge liberties with what is available of the original, are the uses made of the fragments at the hands of the obsessive band of investigative intellectuals. Lichtenberg’s hunchback, his gibbousness, is seen as a seminal part of his development and personality and we learn of his fight with Lavater, the physiognomy expert who sees physical imperfection as sign of character flaws. Goethe also appears sporadically throughout and on his deathbed instead of asking for more light (Licht) had meant to say more Lichtenberg. Free-wheeling and quite an awe-inspiring work of imagination.