Does happiness have a better celebrant than Gert Hofmann (reviews here and here)? Not the delirium of ecstasy (Bataille, Duras), not the withdrawing epiphany which leaves an awed ferment in its wake (Pascal, Kierkegaard), but a steady superabundance of happiness, rosy-cheeked and basic, as it seems to live from itself.
Living from, vivre de: Levinas’s term for that happiness which arises not from lack, but from superabundance. Who has written a more magnificent phenomenology of food, of light and water, of these simplicities from which human suffering is privation? Nothing begins with lack – we are not first hungry and then full, but the other way around. The elements of the world are superabundant: happiness is the plane of life.
For that reason, perhaps, for its immediacy, its simplicity, happiness rarely becomes a theme, or a topic. It is the fall from happiness that is the topic of the novel: the moment of nausea (Sartre) or vertigo (Sebald); the sense that everything is absurd (Camus), or, in act of loving, wondrous (Lawrence); for Hofmann, however, the task is to remain on the plane of this most ordinary of moods.
The hunchbacked Lichtenberg, aphorist and polymath falls in love with a flower girl, Maria Stechard, whom he calls the Stechardess (an archaic German practice for feminine surnames, Gert Hofmann’s son and the translator tells us in an afterword). She comes to fall in love with him, too. Their love continues for three summers, until she dies, aged only 17.
Then where is the dramatic tension? From whence comes the movement of the novel, its narrative interest? In the sprightliness of the narrative voice itself, its spryness, and the many leaps it performs, from short paragraph to paragraph. The narrator – who speaks? – sets the spinning plates in motion – the drama lies in wondering how he will keep them spinning.
When will their happiness end, Lichtenstein and the little flower girl? Will she still love him, she who spends time with one of his young students? She is an adolescent, and he – in his mid thirties, almost middle aged! Surely this is doomed love. Happiness is the tightrope from which one or the other will tumble! But there is no fall. The Stechardess dies; Lichtenberg will fall in love the maid who comes to replace her, who will bear him several children.
Then the events of the novel – the arrival of the flower girl, who comes from an impoverished family to work as a servant in Lichtenberg’s rooms, the company she and her master keep, and then the love that grows between them – record an episode in a life. One which, we know from his contemporaries, was of great importance to the historical Lichtenberg.
Hofmann keeps the plates spinning. So many exclamation marks! So many little leaps, with the upturn of the voice at the end of each line of dialogue! Then the practice of giving us the dates of the historical personnages we encounter. Then the picaresque delights of the narrative itself: the trip to Hanover with Mr. Britain to perform work for George III, both men sleeping side by side in taverns along the way; Lichtenberg’s conversations with his fellow academics: how is it Hofmann can write so lightly? How is it that he writes on tiptoes, so different, say, to those picaresque episodes in Auster, always reported in the same Austerly style?
A book is a mirror; if an ape looks into it an apostle is unlikely to look out. My heart says, I must finish this book as quickly as possible. It is a delight, a trifle, but I admit it: I would rather, much rather, read Vertigo, a book whose narrator seeks and moves, than Hofmann’s book, which remains for the most part confined in Lichtenberg’s rooms. I would rather read of delirious ecstasy, of vertigo – of that mood which seems not just to confirm the whole – the world, the order of being – but what sets itself against its happy presence.
Why? Why is this the case? Why do I not want to be entertained, and swept away by entertainment? Why do I, who so admire Levinas’s phenomenology of happiness (of jouissance) and exhorts his friends to write of food and light and the simplicity of love, do not want to read of the same? The reduction: this expression keeps returning to me. I am thinking of that step back from the world that, in so many philosophers, is the condition of thought, the perpetual beginning of thinking. A step back that is also, as it were, an unconditioning, the unravelling of certainty, and the certainty of happiness.
And isn’t it to reduce myself, to destitute and desituate myself that I try to read and try to write? Isn’t it the solidity of life, its bourgoise comforts that are suspected? This is why, I think, I prefer The Film Explainer to Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, for at least in that book, there is a sense of that menace, the rise of Nazism that would turn so many from their comforts. At least there is a sense of the great, vile threat that should make all happiness tremble.
This is why I remember Levinas as I read Hofmann. When does Levinas learn of happiness, of enjoymnent, of food and light and air and water? This book was written in captivity during the war, he writes in the preface to Existence and Existents. He claims he notes this only to excuse the absence of meditations on those books published in the war years, among them Being and Nothingness.
But isn’t it to underline the fact that his book was written in the midst of the complete destruction of the solidity of the world, whose victims did not know where to lift their dying gaze? The reduction: there is a kind of reading which is engaged by something like this destruction. A loss of oneself, a falling away. Vertigo. Or a book – like Appelfeld’s For Every Sin, which begins when everything has already fallen.
This is not to confuse destruction with a heavy ponderousness, with books weighed down by their own importance. Aren’t Appelfeld’s the lightest of novels? Don’t Sebald’s novels move with great fleetness? In their books, the plane of life must be reachieved – fought for, rediscovered, but with unknown techniques. Reachieved – how to find your way back to the world? Is it possible? And if it is not?
A book is a mirror – but who am I who looks into books for the reduction? Is to desire this, and through fiction, only my idiosyncrasy?
Lars Iyer's Blog 