From the issue dated July 2, 2004
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A Hunched Back, a Searching Heart, and a Fiery Wit
"Man loves company, even if only that of a small burning candle," wrote Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99), the Göttingen polymath whose aphorisms fixed the form in classical German literature. Who but a lonely scholar would close the thought on such an image? When we think of the ilk before the age of electricity, isolation and solitude accompany each scribbler as default condition, as rebuttable presumption. And if erudite loneliness confronts us throughout history, so, still, does the scholar we now variously call "differently challenged," "disabled," or, in some private vocabulary, "cursed" -- by fate or genetic inheritance -- to carry burdens greater than a heavy teaching load, a stressful chairmanship. We see him or her on almost every large campus: the disfavored by nature or fate, the congenitally or circumstantially impaired, going about admirable intellectual business with an air more of accommodated tragedy than gravitas. Even in today's "Small World" of weekend conferences, worldwide cyberintimates, and constant collegial stimulation, we know the difference between the half-filled life and the real thing. We know it, but hardly anyone knows how to render it. Most often, the lonely scholar, in film and fiction, comes off as nerd, nut case, wimp, loser, deviant, psychopath, or jack-of-all-trades dysfunctional. The "heroic scholar" remains a figure, a notion, normal chiefly to a small circle of disciplinary colleagues and professional progeny who owe their old prof a Festschrift, a nod ordinary folk accomplish with a toast at the goodbye dinner. Savor, then, the unexpected miracle of Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl (New Directions), the last novel by the late German writer Gert Hofmann (1931-93), now deftly translated by his son, poet Michael Hofmann. Wry, delicate, incisive, playful, profound -- it may be, iconographically speaking, the most ingenious novel ever written about a damaged scholar and intellectual, its form resourcefully adapted to its subject. Lichtenberg at first seems too complex to permit the simplicity required for such persuasive art. His contemporaries knew him as an Anglophilic professor of physics, a mathematician, astronomer, and satirist renowned as an entertaining lecturer and demonstrator of Enlightenment notions of applied science, a codiscoverer of minor truths of electricity and the principle that undergirds contemporary photocopying. Everyone since who knows him at all does so for his astringent, ironic, anti-romantic, masterfully observed aphorisms, culled from his notebooks (1765-99) he dubbed Waste Books, after the faded English phrase for a business's preliminary accounting books. The clipped one-liners target life with classical precision. Those who never have time do least.As the sentences lengthen, the caustic exactitude rises as well. "Some people come by the name of genius," Lichtenberg wrote, "in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede -- not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above 14." His most famous maxim falls into this category: "A book is a mirror. If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out." No wonder an early commentator called him a "spy on humanity." Praise began to pile up after the publication of nine volumes of his miscellaneous writings from 1800 to 1805. Goethe judged him worthy of study "in a way that few are." Schopenhauer praised him as a true philosopher, capable of "thinking for himself." Nietzsche cited the collection of his aphorisms as one of only four books in German (apart from Goethe's works) worth reading again and again. Karl Kraus asserted that "Lichtenberg digs deeper than anyone." Wittgenstein pushed Lichtenberg's work on friends. The grandeur of Lichtenberg's current literary reputation and the modern appreciation of his sensibility -- empirical, skeptical, vaguely deist -- might have doomed him to the hagiographic stiffness peculiar to so many novels about intellectual giants (think of Catherine Clément's Martin and Hannah as emblematic). So, too, Lichtenberg's personal life and oddities, which his most prominent recent translator, R.J. Hollingdale, called highly "irregular," might have consigned him to sensationalism. The 17th child of a Lutheran Pietist clergyman, Lichtenberg suffered from a malformed spine that left him a 4-foot 9-inch hunchback. The condition dominated his morose thinking about himself -- Lichtenberg's cataloging of his ills led one observer to call him the "Columbus of hypochondria." Yet life also blessed him. Hollingdale, in his excellent introduction to the best edition of Lichtenberg in English -- The Waste Books (New York Review Classics, 2000), 1,085 of Lichtenberg's aphorisms -- explains the key chapter of Lichtenberg's life that informs Hofmann's novel: In 1777 [at age 35], he met Maria Stechard, then age 13 and "a model of beauty and sweetness," who thereafter visited him every day and from Easter 1780 lived with him permanently. His relationship with his "little daughter" was well-known in Göttingen, but nobody was really bothered by it and only the dramatist Kotzebue saw fit to "expose" Lichtenberg's mode of life in a satirical pamphlet of an incomprehensible aggressiveness. Stechard died in August 1782, and Lichtenberg was affected by her death as by nothing before or afterwards.That proved so even though the "afterwards" included marriage to yet another much younger working-class woman, Margarethe Kellner, who bore him many children and survived him by 49 years. Today a Web page devoted to great men of Göttingen glibly refers to Lichtenberg as a "charming, hunchbacked, lecherous hypochondriac." Hofmann's achievement is to devise a spry form, light as the aphorism itself, that encompasses Lichtenberg completely, the tone partly children's story or fairy tale, partly that of sardonic omniscience. It brings together scholar, malcontent, sufferer, and innocent in love with a lilt as pleasing as Lichtenberg's own darts. Hofmann's philosopher, in his mid-30s, faces a town always insistent on seeing, touching, or talking about his hunchback. Even Lichtenberg's mother refers to him as "a permanent shrimp." Lichtenberg laments his poor eyesight and hearing, his endless headaches, his awful teeth, his runtish body, his snorting, his rashes, his "miserable vessel." He thinks mainly of having a woman, sometimes about magnetism and electricity. Throughout, Lichtenberg the scholar never disappears, sitting about his rooms and worrying that his colossal bookcase "will fall on top" of him. He reviles Göttingen (not yet a center of scientific and mathematical genius), a mere "tip of academe," as "a dreadful hole that once you're in it, is hard to get out of." Often "he hated scholarliness and got all melancholy. He sat in a corner and cried: What's it all for? ... Any minute I'll have to start earning money and spreading understanding!" Waspishly observing a fellow professor, he notes those ears "one would like to trim with a pair of scissors." On any given day with his students, "If he happened to be unprepared, he told them something from the history of mathematics that he had read somewhere or just made up on the spot." He keeps a list of immortals among his contemporaries, crossing out their names as they die. He muses that a senile colleague, Wollmann, "hangs around the university like a beautiful old candelabrum that hasn't shed any light for twenty years!" At home, however, his priorities are clear. Writes Hofmann, "What he wanted was a woman!" Instead he gets a girl, "the Stechardess." The marvel of Hofmann's compassionate approach is that we quickly understand, as the critic Michael Dirda aptly observed, that "this isn't Lolita but Beauty and the Beast." The Stechardess is his questioner. He teaches her to read. She teaches him to keep things simple, and not to mind his deformities so much. You see, I've got this thing here, he said, pointing to his hunchback.A story that would trigger an abuse investigation today, that excited jealous gossip among Lichtenberg's peers (but no real threat), comes through to the reader as a love story. His young partner, Lichtenberg said, "reconciled" him to the human race. She kept him content in Göttingen forevermore. He started to think his body might be becoming "more upright." Like many a scholar, he'd found the first thing he "looked for in life ... a fine, warm, quiet place from which to make his observations." "There is no stranger production than a book," Lichtenberg wrote to his friend Amelung. "Set by people who don't understand it, bound by people who don't understand it, sold, read, and reviewed by people who don't understand it, generally also written by people who don't understand it ... " And then there is the occasional masterpiece of intuition, Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, bestowed this season on people -- Chronicle readers -- who will understand it. Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches literature at Herzen University and philosophy at St. Petersburg State University, both in Russia. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 43, Page B14 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education