Pierre Senges, Fragments of Lichtenberg, Dalkey Archive Press, 2016.
If you were to ask a French reader Who’s your literature’s best kept secret?, if said reader had any sense, he would reply Pierre Senges. Fragments de Lichtenberg, Senges’ latest novel, was hands-down 2008′s most fascinating book, and quite probably the best French fiction of the first decade of this century. What if the over 8,000 aphorisms written by German scientist and writer Georg Lichtenberg were actually the pieces of a lost novel? This idea puts in motion a fantastic piece of writing in which a group of scholars creates, with Alfred Nobel’s money, a society dedicated to finding out the novel that hides behind the fragments. To each time its version: romantic, modernist, allegory of the camps, or postmodernist (the Fragments as a hilarious story of Snow White’s eighth dwarf). The parts given over to reconstruction are placed beside examinations of Lichtenberg’s and Goethe’s lives in a sort of weird hall of mirrors populated by links between the society and world events, the whole thing contaminated by digressions of all kinds in what may very well be Senges’ own take on the Situationist concept of the Dérives. This is no mere literary game: what hides behind all this is a deep observation of the links between one’s age and one’s culture; a subtle reflection on the construction of canon, schools, and literary cults that structures our idea of great literature and thus closes our mind to a more dynamic, alternative, or revisionist view—Goethe being the great classic, Lichtenberg representing the open-ended work or approach. It is also a very moving illustration of close reading as a sort of rewriting that goes beyond the specialist consensus, a political novel that dares not say its name, and one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long while. Fragments de Lichtenberg is Senges’ masterwork, the exhilarating novel of a great stylist, a baroque writer that shows us the encyclopedic novel is not an old man’s game. -
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) was, among other things, a scientist - and no mere dabbler either: he was a professor at the Göttingen University. Yet he, and his work -- notably the famous Sudelbücher, a collection of some eight thousand scraps or aphorisms (a selection of which have been published as The Waste Books, in a translation by R.J.Hollingdale; New York Review Books, Amazon.com) -- defy easy, clear (or scientific) classification. Pierre Senges' Lichtenberg-book -- that, at least, it can safely be called -- is similarly 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.
One can see how misunderstandings might arise: Fragments of Lichtenberg is a novel, but hardly straightforwardly so. It is a study of Lichtenberg and his work -- yet one that is far too freely imagined to be considered academically sound or 'reliable'. There's a great deal of invention here -- not just interpretation to the nth degree, but actual fabulation (not that literary scholars don't often indulge in that as well as they read into works and lives ...) -- and yet the result is a profound (if not, in the academic sense, exemplary) scholarly meditation on Lichtenberg and his work. This is not fictional biography -- nothing like most fictional biography, in fact -- and yet 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.
In at one point briefly recounting the life of Callimachus, "the cataloger of the library of Alexandria", Senges concludes with the parenthetical confession:
This, of course, is the legendary version of his life, but it's probably also the truest
The same might well be said about Senges' much more elaborate Lichtenberg-story.
The novel both focuses on the 'fragments of Lichtenberg' -- the eight thousand "fragments of prose" he left behind -- and is presented in fragmented form, in short chapters focused on different aspects of his life and work, as well as on posthumous efforts dealing with the work. Many of these chapters themselves are continuations of one line of thought or history -- the ongoing chapters on the 'History of the Lichtenbergians', for example -- with new installments interspersed in the novel at irregular intervals, while different facets of Lichtenberg's life and career are brought up in not necessarily chronological order. In other words, the narrative shifts every few pages, between the factual, analytic, and invented, cycling repeatedly through certain of them.
There is a great deal of simple biographical detail -- the facts, as they were. Aspects of these are often considered more closely (or broadly) -- and often not those one might expect. So, for example, Lichtenberg was hunchbacked, and Senges offers numerous 'Variations on Gibbosity '-chapters, featuring Lichtenberg's condition and some of the possible consequences of it.
If Senges remains relatively true-to-life with the biographical detail, he nevertheless quickly moves to wild invention and speculation in the other major thread of the narrative, specifically the chapters concerned with 'the Lichtenbergians' and what they make of Lichtenberg's literary waste-paper legacy. Specifically, he posits the formation of a group, the Society of the Lichtenberg Archives -- in part Nobel-funded, no less ! -- dedicated to the study of these works. They are driven, in particular, by conjectures about the work: first there's:
The conjecture of Sax supposes, let's remember, that the eight thousand fragments attributed to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg are actually pieces of a single, immense work (an Immense Whatsit, anyway), to be referred to as the Great Novel
Years are spent trying to piece together the fragments in the 'correct' order, in order to (re)create the work Lichtenberg actually conceived. It makes for a bizarre exercise with seemingly endless potential:
One fragment can be lead to another by guile, misinterpretation, allusion, implication, digression upon digression, or all kinds of narrative shift, because we've lost the proper order of the whole.
(Senges' novel, as presented, isn't nearly this disorganized, yet there certainly a lot of this to it too .....)
This conjecture is followed by another, which finds even greater potential in Lichtenberg's eight thousand pieces:
The conjecture of Sax supposed a single Great Novel that had to be reconstructed by a game of combinations -- the conjecture of Mulligan accepts that nine-tenths of the work has already disappeared into the limbo of ashes. This means that instead of an anagram (too simple), the fragments must be set down, here and there, between great voids, like islands of Micronesia lost in the Pacific.
Imagining that the eight thousand left-over fragments represent just a tenth of Lichtenberg's original great work, they try to fill in the blanks. This also means that: "If the fragments represent the remains of something, anything can happen" -- and Senges imagines pretty much just that, describing eminent Lichtenbergians conceiving large-scale works behind the fragments: another Thousand and One Nights, a Lichtenberg Decameron, a work on Ovid in Rome, a variation on the Noah's Ark story, another take on Robinson Crusoe, or even Snow White's Eighth Dwarf.
Regardless of whether or not Lichtenberg actually was (or meant to be) the author a roman-fleuve, Senges shows his work had the potentiality for it -- and with a series of chapters that consider 'How to break up a roman-fleuve' shows also the potential in the un-doing of his (or any) work.
Senges builds on some of the fragments -- and Fragments of Lichtenberg includes several hundred bits of marginalia, much (though far from all) of it verbatim Lichtenberg's fragments -- notably:
For heaven's sake, don't let me write a book about books. [D 205]
And:
Putting the finishing touches on one's work means to burn it [F 173]
Senges' work is also an anti-Lichtenberg -- if not entirely whole (for what can be entirely whole ?), the fragment-chapters pieced together here are nevertheless nearly exhaustive, the material mined to its very ends, even if not all of it is ultimately spelled out: à la Borges he offers précis of the grandly imagined works, if not the works themselves.
Senges also suggests:
Some imagined Lichtenberg as a parody of humanity (anyone, everyone, you or me), but clearly he should be seen as a parody of Goethe: a satire in the present tense, right there in front of you, evolving as needed, portraying first what Goethe is today, while he's still young, and then what he'll become, and finally his last years and death.
Senges' Lichtenberg finds it hard to take Goethe, especially Goethe-as-(would-be-)scientist, seriously, and the figures are stark contrasts, their differences accentuated by Senges. Indeed, Senges' Lichtenberg is very much a counter-Goethe -- extending also to the posthumous scholarship surrounding the German master. (In fact, Senges begins his novel by sending and setting up Goethe in a hilarious revisionist death-bed scene, Goethe's immortal last words -- "Mehr Licht" ('More light') supposed to in fact also be fragmentary, Goethe unable to get the last two syllables out .....)
Fragments of Lichtenberg is a satire of (literary) scholarship of the past two centuries or so -- and sharp and funny as such -- but that's also just one of the angles. Senges revels in the idea of a Great Novel (marked in no small part by its heft, a necessary part of the proof of its greatness) -- and this too is meant to be a Great Novel, if not on the grandest scale. A novel of novels, too -- even if they themselves are figments, based on elusive fragments that perhaps were never meant to have more meaning than each already held on its own.
Perhaps it all amounts to an exercise proving one of Lichtenberg's own explanations:
I must write in order to learn to appreciate on my own the extent of the chaos within me. [j 1842]
Senges approach is very different from Lichtenberg's -- expansive, rather than succinct -- but similarly revealing (and similarly leaving much up to readers, to make of it what they will).
Fragments of Lichtenberg is dizzyingly entertaining, very funny -- and a surprisingly good introduction to Lichtenberg and his work. It is the best sort of literary fantasy, and an entertaining satire of (so-called) literary scholarship. - M.A.Orthofer
"A sort of mildly crazed Talmud, nestling in its pages the encyclopedia of the universe, with dozens of pages of marginal notes. A giant, meandering Joycean monster, demanding, poetic, and full of humor, a succession of folds, wrinkles, and furrows, in which figures such as Seneca and Punchinello make their appearance, as well as Euclid's calculations and Lavater's physiognomy, the shadow of Snow White's eighth dwarf, and Goethe on his deathbed." - Telerama
"Situated halfway between Borges's labyrinthine library and the constraints of Oulipian manipulation, this extremely baroque autodidact, former jazz guitarist... has produced an impressive inter-textual machine, endowed with a tremendous power of invention." - Le Nouvel Observateur
Pierre Senges is, to my mind, one of the most profound and amusing writers at work today. The English translation of Fragments de Lichtenberg (2007), a long delayed project at Dalkey Archive, and a very big book indeed, will likely be made available
*
“Ironic and rigorously autodictactic, Pierre Senges blazes a fairy-tale-like trail through the forest of erudition. A great admirer of Borges, he finds in the Great Library the sources for a multiform, savant, and joyous inspiration. He’s prolific, too: thirteen books in as many years, not to mention his numerous plays for radio, broadcast by France Culture and France Inter, in which he plays happily on the possibilities of radio.” (publisher’s bio)
§
“From 1994 onwards, Senges trades in his musician’s scales for those of the writer, developing paragraphs on paper, perfecting them, inventorying them, numbering them—not publishing for six years: “Technique in literature is not a bad word for me. It allows one to offer to others what would be, without technique, only obsession or madness.” […] He lived in Grenoble for many years. As for formal study, there was little to none. He was registered as a sociology student, but never set foot on campus: one of the most erudite French writers of his generation, one of the most talented in terms of composition and phrasing, is an autodidact. Maybe that’s why his encyclopedism isn’t at all pedantic: each book is an adventure that allows him to conquer all books, like a child, or a doe running through a forest.” (Philippe Lançon for Libération, 2008)
§
“I admit the word ‘Baroque,’ if by that you intend its broad, most common meaning: that which lets everything in, which prefers a curved line to a straight line, detour to destination, irony to distraught naïveté, and a certain inelegance in the multiplication of digressions.” (Philippe Lançon for Libération, 2008)On Miklos Szentkuthy and the truly endless possibilities opened up through digression : “If I could imitate anyone, it would be Szentkuthy. He takes up literature in a casual, complex-free way. The writer is a satrap who is allowed to do anything, whom no one can reproach because he is a satrap and because he is doing his job.” (Philippe Lançon for Libération, 2008)
§
Eric Loret: By questioning fiction, you obviously question the real. Is your intention to address a certain kind of contemporary mental confusion, a schizophrenia of appearances?Arno Bertina: I don’t think that’s specific to our time. To be contemporary means to be confronted with confusion.
Pierre Senges: Yes, as with Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. It quickly became “life is a film” or “life is a video game,” but ultimately our intelligence for this problem has hardly evolved. It’s one of literature’s fundamental interrogations. And the society of the spectacle wasn’t invented yesterday either. There’s more to be learned from Saint-Simon than from Debord concerning the agony of appearances. An injunction is often set before the writer: “Tell us about the contemporary world.” But supposedly realist novels that speak of ‘our’ time are books that tell more of a ‘here and now’ that’s commonly accepted at a given moment. An execrable consensus, with its basis only in reality’s most ostentatious signs. You could just as well say “the world is 70% water and two billion Chinese people, so write about Chinese sailors.” Art should promulgate realities. (“Figures implosées,” Libération, 2006)
§
On the occasion of the publication his first book, Veuves au maquillage (2000): “What I set out to do is not description or narration, but rather a commentary on that description or narration; in other words, to approach it from the outset in the second degree.” (Chronic’art)“I sometimes have the impression that my love of stories leads me into territories that are further and further away from what stories usually look like—and, along with that, the impression that I am telling stories of stories, instead of stories of people.” (2012 Interview with Estelle Mouton-Rovira)
“Literature as commentary might be one of our great, new-found pleasures (what richness!): there’s Szentkuthy’s Marginalia on Casanova to be savored, the monomaniacal commentary of the king-in-exile Kinbote in Pale Fire, the Parallel Book of Manganelli which is parasitical to Pinocchio, and more recently the Glossary of Greek Birds of D’Arcy Thompson, accompanied by the (I quote) amateurish commentaries of Dominque Meens. But parasitism or commensalism are hardly new, and literary experts know that better than anyone.” (2012 Interview with Estelle Mouton-Rovira)
§
“I especially like the idea of a literature of hypotheses: there are very strong resemblances between scientific hypothesis and comedic scenario: in both cases, one must start with a postulate, then deduce the consequences and sort out those which are viable from those which are not. That Let us suppose forms the initial point of departure for both scientific argument and the work of the librettist—scientific literature has borrowed a great deal from works of poetic and narrative literature, and poetry and the novel have for a long time been nourished by scientific literature, namely because science, through its qualitative vulgarization, necessarily has recourse to metaphor. In a Carrollian way, our modern imagination (there’s modernity again) is inhabited by Einstein twins of different ages, Schrödinger’s cat, simultaneously both dead and alive, and the dactylographic chimpanzee invented by Émile Borel.Scientists, who create the basis for part of what we know and our criteria for truth, would be well situated to write, fictionally perhaps even, a history of errors, deceptions, and ignorance. Not so much to give rise to a feeling of impotence, because the shortcomings of our knowledge don’t lead us fatally into the absurd, but—without lapsing into a dilettante-ish relativism—so that we might perceive how error and exactitude feed off of each other, how the false enriches the true, how we stand to benefit from received ideas and when it’s better to do away with them.” (2012 Interview with Estelle Mouton-Rovira)
§
Pierre Senges: The imposture of realism in literature supports the imposture of liberalism, which tells us that the free market is reality and not an opinion about reality. Saying a writer must be a realist isn’t an answer, but a question.Arno Bertina: But literature gladly comes along to pull out the rug from underneath the feet of these people, by showing that the definition of reality is not closed, that there is movement. The humor that is in our books takes into account, I think, the instability and the play inherent in representation. (“Figures implosées,” Libération, 2006)
§
“Generally speaking, a book is one of those rare objects that, if it succeeds, respects us. (…) Advertising doesn’t respect us, political speeches don’t respect us; sermons address us as imbeciles, literary manifestos address us as imbeciles, our neighbors might act as if we’re imbeciles. A bad book takes us for imbeciles. But a good book is one of the few places in the world where we find respect, whoever we might be.” (at remue.net)
Pierre Senges, The Major Refutation: English version of Refutatio major, attributed to Antonio de Guevara (1480–1545), Trans. by Jacob Siefring, Contra Mundum, 2016.
sample (pdf)
Here is a book that unites all books: adventure book, historical panorama, satirical tale, philosophical summa, polemical mockery, geographical treatise, political analysis.
This edition of The Major Refutation is followed by a scholarly afterword discussing the conditions of the text’s genesis.
“Few or none of them heard of a book entitled Refutatio major, falsely attributed to Don Antonio de Guevara, in which the aforementioned Guevara avers that there does not exist a New World, but only chimaeras, malevolent rumors, and inventions spread by schemers. These same persons affirm that the reasons set forth by the aforementioned Guevara are highly disconcerting.” — Bonaventura d’Arezzo, Treatise on Shadows (1531)
“If this new world actually existed, if its measure could be had in hectares and in tons, or more maliciously in carats to reflect the value of its diamond mines, or in nautical miles because it is seemingly capable of devouring an entire hemisphere as a crab would, going from north to south and from east to west — if this were the case, then adventurers would have set foot there long ago, smugglers failing to find a better use for their discovery would have taken it as their refuge, and instead of traffickers by nature mute about their rallying points, we would have heard the cries of one thousand boasters, one thousand returning voyagers.” — The Major Refutation
In an age when climate denial, an increasing distrust of immigrants, and the epithet “fake news” dominate the headlines, the eloquent arguments ventured forth in the pages of the anonymous Refutatio major (c. 1517–1525) play neatly against the public consciousness, reminding us that, even now, there are still those who hold to a view that the world is flat and the moon landings were fabricated. But none of our contemporary doubters or conspiracy theorists who peddle their “alternate facts” would deny the existence of the New World. . . However, in the decades that followed Christopher Columbus’ fated encounter with a land mass that would soon turn long held assumptions about the geographical reality of the world on their heads, what sort of skeptics might have crawled out of the woodwork?
Well, if you accept the premise French author and playwright, Pierre Senges, is prepared to offer alongside his spirited “translation” of this curious treatise claimed by no one but attributed to Antonio de Guevara, we have a Renaissance-era Latin document that purports to call into question the veracity of the reports, artefacts, and individuals ferried across the ocean from this distant new land by a steady stream of seafaring Spanish and Portuguese adventurers, colonists, and missionaries who have disappeared and reappeared over the watery western horizon since the reported discovery of the Mundus novus. And what an imaginative and persistent defense is waged in this apparent “Epistle to Charles V,” now translated into English by Jacob Siefring as The Major Refutation.
The new world, an enchantment? however when John Day, a good sailor no doubt, but a geographer of little import, announces that somewhere to the west islands have been found where “grass grows,” he is either smirking with deceit, or mocking our rulers, to whom he extends an offer of six square yards of lawn in the guise of a vast kingdom. These men go off into the horizon, where they lose their heads, exert themselves furiously, ravish Indian women, move mountains and entire populations, drown a thousand sailors in their wake, and then come back to us, swearing in magnificent syllables that grass grows on these lands and that in their environs, by the grace of God, rain falls from on high.
Senges is a prolific French writer, but to date little of his work is available in English. With a spirit akin to Borges and Calvino, Senges frequently exploits the possible, potential, and unfinished spaces that exist in history or literature. That porous line between fact and invention is blurred with a nimble oratorical style that lends itself to work with a sharp satirical, critical, and philosophical edge. Throughout the text, the personages and recorded events are real, but it’s the dogged determination to prove that the celebrated New World is an elaborate hoax that forms the heart and soul of this wildly entertaining feat of double imposture.
The magic of The Major Refutation lies in the delight the author (or his surrogate, shall we say) takes in language. The biting, sarcastic humour is infectious. One can imagine our Franciscan chronicler writing with a healthy measure of unholy abandon in this passionate entreaty to Charles V, king and Holy Roman Emperor. Antonio De Guevara (1480–1545), the imagined author of the manuscript at hand, was in truth, no stranger to writing in the voice of another—he infamously penned a text he tried to pass off as original by Marcus Aurelius. Granted free reign he openly attacks anyone, his clerical brethren notwithstanding, who comes within his sights in his effort to prove that the so-called New World is nothing more than a grandly orchestrated act of fraud and collusion. The concessions granted with respect to dominion over the distant vistas fail to impress him:
To the observer, these textual games and universal decrees sitting alongside and contradicting one another, these privileges to a single treasure granted to so many, these supposedly definitive treaties that are deprecated before the year is even up, that manner of signing at just two streets’ remove a couple of decrees that mutually refute one another, all the while perceiving that the world carries on under the weight of such numerous paradoxes, to the solitary witness all of this looks as much like naiveté, as much like a superior ruse. Because to adopt a proprietary attitude towards invisible islands is either proof of blindness, become lately a fashion of the courts & palaces, or it is a deliberate strategy, dictated by the crafty to the envious; to delude the people, it would hence be a question of acting as though the chimerical continents were so valuable they were worth the price of humiliations on their behalf, worth the aristocrats sharing trading posts and territories, like barkers sharing stalls in the marketplace.
With an stirring echo of florid baroque language, The Major Refutation calls in the prominent personages of the day, and implicates the state, merchant bankers, and the Church in the creation and perpetuation of the myth of the new world. Queen Isabella, Columbus’ sponsor, is a favourite suspect to whom the author returns repeatedly. He imagines ingenious means by which the entire enterprise could be facilitated —insisting that once beyond the horizon ships turn south to Cape Verde to hold over before sailing back with gold smuggled out of Spanish coffers and returned again. Of course, the unspoken value of fostering belief in a far off land of untold wealth and opportunity is not lost on him:
The principal reason for the invention of the new world would surely be to send off into the ocean a portion of our great surplus of useless men, who fill our countrysides, our cities, and betwixt the twain our faubourgs, with the speed of a spreading plague. . . . The new world and the enticing advertisements which speak of it so fantastically invite all these beggars & jobless, worthless players to board dinghies, strap a sail to their torso and head due west, without demerit. A steady stream of disfigured men, ugsome-faced knaves and scrawny blackguards have thus quit terra firma, this world for its beyond, in prestigious and ruined galleons.
From the opening “Editor’s Foreword” that places the Refutation into historical context, to the scholarly “Afterword” that vigorously defends the case for Antonio de Guevara, confessor to Charles V, as the probable author while considering less likely alternate candidates, Senges is essentially presenting a carefully designed meditation on the nature of truth—on that which is credible and that which is contrived, on belief and doubt. Selecting de Guevara as his preferred composer, a historical figure with an attempted forgery to his credit, and allowing him to imply that his faith in his own argument is perhaps less than genuine, adds depth to the layers of a deception designed and executed as one thoroughly intelligent and entertaining whole.
Of course, the release of the of “English Version of Refutatio major” in late 2015, ten years after the “original” French version, is especially timely. Conspiracies abound. In saecula saeculorum.
- https://roughghosts.com/2017/03/28/truth-lies-and-wild-allegations-the-major-refutation-by-pierre-senges/
The Major Refutation by Pierre Senges (translated by Jacob Siefring) is a forged forgery falsely attributed to a real forger by a writer of fictions. Let’s pick that apart.
Antonio de Guevara existed. He was a monk and a courtier of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was also a popular author who provoked controversy by making spurious historical claims in his books. The Major Refutation is ostensibly a long-lost manuscript of Guevara’s, in which he attempts to refute Christopher Columbus’s #FakeNews that a continent lies across the Atlantic from Europe. An afterword casts doubt on Guevera’s authorship. Many other famous or obscure persons in and after the 16th-century might plausibly have written The Major Refutation. But The Major Refutation is actually, of course, a novel by Pierre Senges. He doesn’t drop character as the editor of a long lost manuscript even once, but copyright pages don’t lie (more’s the pity), so we know that if we go ad fontes, we find Senges. Amazon, happily, has been taken in by the ruse, and lists (as of this writing) Antonio de Guevara as one of the authors of the book.
The Major Refutation is an extremely weird and many-leveled experiment, seemingly committed to a motto buried in its own pages:
The fake does not have the qualities of the true, it only appears to have them; yet, at the risk of pleading against mine own cause, I must admit that the efforts used by counterfeiters often merit far greater attention […]
I have some thoughts about all of this. But first, a glance at the surface of the thing. The opening paragraph displays all the book’s tics and tendencies in one prefigurative sentence. It’s a dedication:
To Charles I of Ghent, who is as magnificent as I am lowly and disparate, formerly by chance, now by necessity; to Charles of Ghent who is the most extraordinary and by far the most fortuitously placed ruler Europe has ever seen on its soil, from Extremadura to the basics of Flanders to the ship of the Hansa; to Charles who, like a child dropped into the lions’ den and brought up alongside his fellow creatures, converts innocence to knowledge and hastens to redress his lack of preparedness through more work and authority; to Charles who has no peer in taking the power held out to him by his ancestors, as if he were accepting no more than a slice of pineapple, and who is peerless as well in relinquishing it, or feigning to do so, within his palaces, where he vows his humble powers to the God he imagines, summons, or dismisses at will; to Charles the Burgundian who knew how to strike fear into the hearts of the Spanish before he subjugated them, giving to eternity the example of a sovereign boldly coming face to face with each of his subjects, because he knew how to appear in their eyes as both a demon and an ordinary man (and to deceive them on both accounts, but with ample guile); to Charles who knew how to trim his family tree, to never subordinate the demands of State to filial love, nor waver in judgment before complaints or appeals, including those of kith and kin — to Charles I of Ghent, the author dedicates the present book.
Still with me?
As you will have noticed, The Major Refutation is written in a relentlessly oratorical style. The sentences are long, ornate, architectural, formal, yet digressive. They are stuffed with allusions to history and literature and out-dated science. The book is a triumph of research by Senges, but you will have to choose whether to allow those allusions to pour over you like water, or to track all or some of them down. I wavered back and forth, spending half an hour on some pages, and covering a few dozen others in as many minutes.
The novel is an undertaking (to read, to have written, to have translated). I think it’s a worthy one.
*
I hold that a good novel is, among other things, entertaining. The Major Refutation is entertaining. But not often in the normal ways that novels are entertaining, and not, I suspect, entertaining for everyone. Character and plot are buried here to be extracted, if you dig. Gradually, one learns about Guevara’s feud with another scholar named Peter Martyr; and the text itself tells the story of its author gradually confusing himself and coming to desire something different than he did at first. But these, as I said, are narratives to be extracted from a book which is, on the surface, exactly what it looks like: a long attempt to refute the existence of the Americas. It takes work to extract those narratives, and while some find such work good fun in itself, others might be dissuaded from the whole experience by the difficulty the form presents.There are other possible entertainments on the surface of this book besides a plot: style above all. Long luxurious sentences eventually begin to spin by like lines of poetry. Also there is humor. Mostly wit, occasionally straight comedy, as when Guevara addresses his parrot from the midst of his increasingly insane ranting.
So that’s what The Major Refutation offers as an entertainment: strange, lovely writing; humor; a story-line if you squint.
*
What The Major Refutation offers uniquely, because of its unusual form, is a reflection on the value of counterfeiting to truth (and of course, by extension, the value of fiction to life). Guevara’s mode of “refutation” is actually conspiracy theorizing. As consumers, lately, of even more conspiracies than usual, we recognize the form: they render an unlikely alternative conception of reality plausible by forming a web of highly detailed minor connections. — Not unlike Sherlock Holmes, buttressing his unlikely large scale deductions by a host of minor observations. If this person has noticed all these subtle details and connected them with such ingenuity, how can they be wrong on the big glaring point their subtlety subtends?Really good conspiracy theorists have the paradoxical effect of raising the standards of evidence and the scrutiny that precedes belief: it’s the casual counterfeiters we have to fear. We have to worry about the liars who don’t care how shabby and easy to dispel their untruths are, the fabricators who rely upon the prolificity of their perversions rather than intricacy or excellence of their designs. In our time, numerous parties seem to be attempting forgery by brute force, the deployment of auotmated repetition and dissemination as a form of persuasion — not verisimilitude but virality allow the lies that surround us to sink in. In such a climate, a conspiracy theory like The Major Refutation, with its elaborate scaffolding of plausibility and research, is also a pointed reminder of the tawdry laziness of much modern propoganda.
[M]y Refutation is not strictly speaking a work of debunking , and uniquely that, but rather an invitation from one dupe to other dupes to listen to how the stories go round and repeat, to see how a counterfeit money circulates…
The actually revolutionary implication of this investigation is the power it reveals to belong to the honest dupe: that is, to the wondering person, who innocently believes a lie. That person, who, multiplied, is the great sleeping beast of society coddled and lulled by the lies of the powerful, has, ultimately, all the power:
there comes a moment when the world’s last remaining free dupe holds unto himself the conditions necessary to the survival of the imposture: and paradoxically his power is then immense if the collective delusion is to depend on his credulity.
In an interview, Senges has said that the imposture of realism in literature supports that of liberalism: the idea that the free market is a basic reality rather than something forcibly imposed and continuously maintained by force. He has also said that he forbids himself short sentences because the short sentence is peremptory whereas it ought to doubt itself.
The form of The Major Refutation mirrors its theme perfectly: a scrutiny so intense, brought to bear with specialties so hysterically refined, leads the object studied to crumble, and the investigator himself to vanish into self-doubt. - Robert Minto http://robertminto.com/the-major-refutation-senges/
I have from time to time be contacted by the translator to review their latest book and this was the case with Jacob , whom I knew vaguely via twitter and the fact he has been championing this writers work. He has translated a number of works by Pierre Senges . Pierre Senges start initially as a jazz musician , this I note as later I do wonder if this hs influenced his style of writing . He has been a writer since the 1990s and has written over fifteen books and also a large number of works for radio in France. He is noted for his baroque style and the way he twists history with a way of keeping the original style to his works .
If this New world actually existed, if its measure could be had in hectares and in tons, or maliciously in carats to reflect the value of its diamond mines, or in nautical miles because it is semmingly capable of devouring an entire hemisphere as a crab would , going from north to south and from east to west- if this were the case , then adventures would have set foot there long ago ,smugglers failing to find better use for their discovery would have taken it as their refugeeThis book is meant to be a work that was written by Antonio De Guevara , this is a work that was mention supposedly and lost then found and it is a work The book is a work about trips to discover what is the new world then to send people these written as a treatise to Charles V , about the falsehood of the new world. this is back in a time when of course some people thought the earth was flat and places unknown on maps were often just marked with the words here be monsters ! De Guevara argument is that the new world isn’t all it is meant to be and is a creation by others to deceive the king and other and De Gueveara brings many arguments to why this is the case in what are letter like chapters.
From the opening page of the Major Refutation , this seems true how could something so large be unknown !
The invention of the new world and of the useless islands supposed the invention of evidence, fabricated on this side f the earth, on the continent, in the portuguese colonies perhaps but always brought back into port; for it is impossible to make a country of fog,of phantoms and of gleaming gold exist out there with out having some exotic but tangible scraps wash up on our beaches .Some talk might have sufficed; our taverns are full of those boasters returned from afar, full of one-armed men who clasped in an embrace the great Khan of China and the incestuous gang of prester JohnWhen I started blogging the real hunt for me wasn’t just world lit , no I could just count countries I do but not in a race . For me the reason I blog is to be like an explorer of books a discoverer of fiction , an adventure on the edge of what the novel is and this is why getting connect with guy like Jacob and been introduce to a writer like Pierre Senges this book is a book that has thanks to the time Jacob spent translating it , you can find out more on Jacobs blog . This is a book that defies pigeonholed .For me the fact in his early life he was into jazz and was a musician plays a part in this book , great jazz can take something ordinary and twist it and bend it into something totally new.so like John Coltrane in his working of my favourite things we have some part of the original . Well lets break this down Fray Antoino de Guevera was a preacher and his preaching was about peace and a different vision of what empire was , Charles the fifth was the spanish lead at the time the new world was discovered. So the parts are their want Pierre Senges has done is create a rift on the two men and the idea of there being a treatise on there not being a new world . I loved this as Jacob said it is a unusal book and one that if he hadn’t pushed we wouldn’t have read , one great thing is so many transltors have there pet projects and maybe publisher need listen to them more (a sublte nod here to Horcynus Orca which I know is a pet project of Andrea Camelleri translator ), how many more are out there !! - winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/the-major-refutation-by-pierre-senges/
The New World is made up of lies , boasters and false goods
Pierre Senges on The Major Refutation (audio)
Many Ways to Stuff a Watermelon | Pierre Senges — Translated by Jacob Siefring
IN HIS BOOKS, PIERRE SENGES IS BORGESIAN. I won’t be the first to say it — there are many glaring differences, I’ll admit (Senges is a master of the long sentence, as graceful of a clown as Buster Keaton, whereas Borges’s style always strikes me as cool and measured), but nevertheless, from its earliest appearance (Veuves au maquillage, 2000), Senges’s work seems to proceed from two distinctly Borgesian principles. Let’s identify them; they might make a fair introduction to the translated selection you are about to read. To wit —
i. Senges tells stories of stories, narrating tales in the second degree. In “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” and “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain,” Borges showed how it was possible to achieve a never-before-seen economy by offering a short précis of a fictional work, or even a body of work. By a stroke of genius or laziness (if not both), an author might bring novels into the world without ever writing them: he might simply describe them as though they were already fully formed. “What I set out to do was not a description, a narration, but rather a commentary on a description or narration; in other words, to approach it from the outset in the second degree,” Senges told an interviewer in 2000 apropos of Veuves au maquillage. Using this approach, narration can be endowed with a kind of lightness or agility it could not otherwise have. We find this quickness or lightness almost everywhere in Senges’s writing.
ii. It supposes imposture, if not coauthorship. Whereas Borges’s Pierre Menard is content to reproduce but some small portions of Don Quixote, in a dozen years Pierre Senges composed almost as many books in the vein of as many other authors. Perhaps the most impressive example is La réfutation majeure, recently published in English by Contra Mundum Press; a treatise systematically refuting the existence of the Americas, it is attributed to Antonio de Guevara (1480-1545), a popular Renaissance author and confessor to Charles V. According to the Refutation, the new world would be as insubstantial and illusory as a string of flyaway islands, or a band of wyverns: a colossal hoax, perpetrated for mercantile ends. It is a book such as Jorge Luis Borges might have described, but never written, and it enlists on its behalf an astonishing amount of erudition concerning the Spanish Baroque period and myths of antiquity. What Italo Calvino said of Borges might as well sum up the intertextual nature of Senges:
“Each of his texts doubles or multiplies its own space through the medium of other books belonging to a real or imagined library, whether they be classical, erudite, or merely invented.”
Thus in his bibliography you will find: a book-length monologue delivered by an actor who once played Macbeth (or by Macbeth himself, perhaps; Entre l’assassin sort le spectre, 2007); a 630-page novel that finds Captain Ahab going on Broadway then to Hollywood to sell his whale-tale to the highest bidder (Achab (séquelles), 2015); another novel, of equal heft, tracking a century’s progress of a learned society of Lichtenbergians as they attempt to piece together Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s countless aphorisms into a coherent narrative (Fragments de Lichtenberg, 2008); a tale in the mock form of a botanical encyclopedia, recounting a Biblical apocalypse fomented by a cadastral clerk on the verge of retirement by means of his guerilla gardening (Ruines-de-Rome, 2002); a rewriting of the Persian Letters of Montesquieu, setting its sights on life in the modern metropolis (Géométrie dans la poussière, 2004); and — last but not least, for it concerns us presently — a book reprising Franz Kafka’s ill-begotten fragments (Études de silhouettes, 2010).
The diaries and notebooks Max Brod took custody of after Kafka’s death happened to contain a number of very brief texts that were presumably abandoned or incomplete at conception. Some of these have appeared in English translation, either in The Blue Octavo Notebooks (trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, Exact Change, 1991) or Abandoned Works: Unedited Works 1897-1917 (trans. Edna Pfitzner, Sun Vision Press, 2012). Still more, I believe, may be read in French translation in volume two of the Pléiade edition of Kafka’s Œuvres complètes, or in German in Tagebücher 1910-1923 (Fischer Verlag, 1951) and Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlass (Fischer Verlag, 1953).
Taking these stillborn incipits as points of departure, Senges teases out unclassifiable texts from them. While they vary in length from just six lines to six pages, their tenor is hard to categorize, for in this motley assembly we find neighbouring each other outlines of tales, madcap soliloquies, riffs on fairy tales, outré anecdotes, dubious textual commentaries, deranged monologues, perverse parables, et cetera. In some instances a single fragment of Kafka’s is reprised multiple times, yielding multiple versions, parallel texts suggesting the possibility of infinite variation. Other times, a unique fragment is driven to its logical extreme, or gives way to a dizzying cascade of ab absurdum speculation, and we marvel how things might have unspooled differently. As one might expect, all of Kafka’s familiar obsessions — the night and its terrors, the law, justice and its lack, bureaucracy, animals, et cetera — are here in force. Each passage begins in boldface to indicate the hand of the Prague lawyer, before giving way to Senges’s liberties.
The book from which our selection is drawn, Études de silhouettes, was published in 2010 by Éditions Verticales. The editors and the translator would especially like to thank Éditions Gallimard and the author for their support in publishing this original selection. - Jacob Siefring
A cry rises up from the river — the cry is that of a drowned person: logically (a bit of ethics combined with the impossibility of doing otherwise), it is my duty to dive in, without knowing whether doing so will save the drowned person from drowning, or add a second corpse to the first, just as heavy, adrift with its boots on in the swirls of the treacherous river, and send up to the shore a two-voiced cry, tenor and countertenor, not so lovely as to claim a part in the choir of sirens but persuasive enough, I hope, to draw towards us another rescuer: whether he can swim matters little: just so long as he comes to join us.
Were we deranged? We were running at night through the park, brandishing branches. To run is no sign of derangement, after all, a great number of athletes receive gold medals and hefty bonuses for it; nor is running in itself a bad omen, it’s a natural way of moving, it must come down to us from our hunter ancestors, or a deliquent great-grand-uncle, going on the lamb with every patrol of the police: at worst, it is a symptom of diarrhea, and draws its justification from questions of decency and hygiene, the exact opposite of insanity: that race leads the patient away from the asylums to bring him nearer to the bathroom. To run at night is perhaps the preoccupation of father abbots and mother superiors, night guards and dormitory wardens; anything that walks at night being for them a sign of either derangement or deviltry, like an escapee’s attempt or the gymnastics of an insomniac: running at night would at best be a sign of adulterous love, when the lovers slip clandestinely from one room to another, out windows, to the song of the nightingale — and if the moon lights the scene, their precipitations might give the appearance from afar of a dance of fauns. But nevertheless, between ourselves, running at night does not make a man into a lunatic, night changes nothing to the day, the race remains a legitimate act and the proof of the mastery of mind over body: that this night race should or shouldn’t go through a park is in no way alarming, unless some bygone bacchic hordes are discovered, the forest full of mysteries, or savage life, or animality, or symbols interweaving bushy sexuality with brutality. Unless we devote ourselves to interpretation, and wait for the runners at the park’s exit to welcome them with open arms whilst helping them into a straitjacket, nothing obliges us to see in the nocturnal race from one end of the park to the other a sign of madness: the park is a place particularly suited to races, even the night race: to run on a sloped roof would be to comport oneself much less discriminately. We were brandishing branches? alright, we were brandishing branches, why not? — probably elm or ash branches, probably branches found at the foot of trees, what could be more logical than the presence of branches on a park path, what could be further from madness than that logic of a detective gardener? All things considered, it appears clear to me at present (if I calmly think back to those famous night races through the woods, covered with leaves — without nostalgia nor shame, with the lucidity necessary for memoirs, let’s say for the case history, but without growing weak either, reason hunting down madness in its every last hiding place), it appears clear to me that to run through a park while brandishing branches is precisely what, in the natural order of things, leads us farthest away from madness, the madness of clinics or of poets and mystics: not to run like that, by night, amongst the trees, while raising up a linden bough over one’s head would on the contrary be a first step in the direction of lunacy — so long as the race continues, the night, the park, the foliage, we remain on the side of human reason.
During my grade school years, it was my custom to go and see a certain Joseph Mack from time to time, a friend of my late father. When after having left the school I wanted to see what this Joseph Mack had been up to, little by little I had to face reality (little by little is my habitual way: I have always been too slow, like Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus, who was slow to understand and engendered a race of cozened men to which I belong). To face reality: not only did Joseph Mack no longer live on Prinz-Albrecht Straße, but he now wanted to be called Bernstein, and had switched the first name Joseph for Ulrich (more melodious to his ears perhaps). Of course, such changes of address and name had had a notable influence on his way of life (to content himself with a quiet life in the country, he had had to renounce the delights of the Zimmermann café), but it seemed his very countenance had been affected by it, as though by some accident or a skin disease, or a period of war followed by an infinite chagrin: how many have we seen returning from abroad, their faces metamorphosed as if they had lived through their own death, sojourned underground, and returned to the surface, by scraping away the sand, back to the living, to henceforth air their Lazarus face among them, so piteous as to have washed up. Poor Joseph Mack, I mean poor Ulrich Bernstein, so far from the city, in his funeral attire, his face long and thin like those we see in the paintings of el Greco, whereas it used to be round and red, a veritable face of a sanguine wine drinker, a lover of fruits in summer and winter both, and of Dutch brioches — poor Ulrich: no memory of my father, he no longer knew his name, and as for myself, he hardly wished to receive me, standing straight and still at the door of his country house without those marks of friendship so agreeable during my grade school years: not a word, formulas of politeness that one usually reserves for the traveling salesman, and in his gaze foreignness itself, which is to say indifference and, I have to say it, sufficiently bad faith to pretend not to recognize me — when we said our adieux, he wished me safe travels under the name of Hermann Klein, even though my name is Leopold Hilbig, it always has been, just like my late father, and before him my father’s father, and before him distant ancestors in the time of the Defenestration of Prague — ever since then, in the streets of this small country village and in the middle of Prinz-Albrecht Straße, it is Hermann Klein who follows me, it is by this name that the Göttinger sausage merchants and Swiss cheese vendors salute me, it is by this name that my fiancée insults me, I should say my ex-fiancée, and it is this name, Hermann Klein, that a judge saw fit to inscribe at the top of an arrest warrant.
A watchman! a watchman! What are you watching for? Who hired you? One thing alone, the disgust you feel for yourself, makes you richer than the wood louse, who is lying under the old stone, and watching. What am I watching for? for you and yours, not for the queen’s jewels, nor for the king’s sleep: I’m watching for you, for your siesta, your readings and these meditations that make you into a wise philosopher, to wit, this great smooth talker as capable of giving lessons in disgust as he is of appraising the intrinsic value of beings, of wood lice and watchmen. No one hired me, no one other than you, with the loose change you get from your rents, to get me to march day and night along these circular paths, around your house and your bedroom, so that you can study the life and times of Cicero without fear of seeing a thief intruding into your foyer, your stable, and doing what thieves do everywhere; I march and I swing the lantern till dawn in order to deepen your night and give you whatever you need to talk about riches to anyone who will listen the next morning — and you say that my disgust elevates me above a wood louse? oh but hardly, scarcely higher, only so high that my shame releases me, as the cord that binds me to life one day will, or expends itself as momentum expends itself, so that I fall back down again, rejoin the wood louse, become him again or his brother, now divested of that disgust, my sole awareness, my sole illusion of intelligence, while leaving you, the sleeper, the placid sleeper, watchman of nothing and no one, so much higher than the wood louse, higher than myself, too, as far from us as the length of your talk comparing Disgust to Old Stones.
http://partisanhotel.co.uk/Etudes-de-silhouettes
Pierre Senges, Adventures of Percival, Dis Voir, 2009.
The first installment in Dis Voir's new "illustrated fairy tales for adults," "The Adventures of Percival" is based on the classic probability proposition that a chimpanzee randomly typing will eventually type a Shakespeare sonnet. Here, McIntosh, a gardener-mathematician (and spiritual cousin of Baron Munchhausen), decides to take the fable seriously, and with the assistance of a typewriter and a chimpanzee called Percival, undertakes to enact the experiment. Naturally things don't go as planned, as the chimpanzee proves to be less compliant than expected and bizarre behavioral mergings occur between man and animal. Nicolas de Crecy's comic drawings sometimes illustrate and sometimes contradict Senges' narrative, or inveigle themselves between his lines like a creeper. Inspired by research in animal behavior led by Dominique Lestel, and by the work of the landscape artist-gardener Alain Richert, Senges' tale of interspecies cognition makes a conscious nod towards contemporary debates within the cognitive sciences.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.