Читать книгу Anthology of Black Humor - André Breton - Страница 21

To believe or not to believe: this dilemma has never been debated with more pathos or genius than by a man such as Lichtenberg, endowed as he was to the highest degree with a sense of intellectual quality. We see him in 1775, in the front row of a London theater, eyes riveted on the actor Garrick as he delivers Hamlet’s monologue: “Dignified and serious, he looks to the ground, to the side. Then, removing his right hand from his chin (but if I remember correctly, his right arm nonetheless remains supported by his left), he utters the words: ‘To be or not to be,’ in hushed tones. But because of the great silence (and not the exceptional quality of his voice, as some have written), he can be heard everywhere.” Lichtenberg’s voice was no less admirably posed, and his particular inquiry into the realm of knowledge managed to draw the most unexpected benefits from his physical deformity (he was a hunchback), even as it provoked only unparallelled silence, which at present has grown into total neglect. It would be rather pointless to call him back from that silence, which has rarely been broken since his death, if not for the fact that many of the figures Lichtenberg inspired were precisely those for whom posterity most counted. Goethe, for example, despite some very definite dis-agreements with Lichtenberg, wrote that we can use his writings “as a marvelous magic wand. Whenever he makes a joke, there is always a problem hidden inside.” Kant, toward the end of his life, placed Lichtenberg at the highest level, and in his personal copy of the Aphorisms he underlined many passages in red or black. Schopenhauer saw him as the thinker par excellence, one who used his mind for himself and not for others. Nietzsche placed the Aphorisms, alongside Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, among the “treasures of German prose.” In 1878, Wagner believed he discovered in them an anticipation of his own thought. Tolstoy, in 1904, placed himself under Lichtenberg’s influence more willingly than under Kant’s, and expressed amazement at the injustice of his posthumous fate: “I don’t understand how contemporary Germans could so neglect this author, whereas they are crazy about a slick journalist like Nietzsche.”

Lichtenberg’s life, no less than Swift’s, abounded in fascinating contradictions, all the more fascinating in that they stemmed from an eminently reasonable mind. A supremely conscious atheist, not only did he deem Christianity to be “the most perfect system for fostering peace and happiness in the world,” but it even happened in moments of emotional turmoil that he abandoned himself to the mystical life of others, going so far as to “pray fervently.” After having written: “The French Revolution is the result of philosophy, but what a leap from Cogito ergo sum to the cry ‘To the Bastille!’ echoing from the Palais Royal!” and after having accepted the Terror, he was moved to tears by the death of Marie Antoinette. As much as he despised love à la Werther, in 1777 he fell for a young girl of twelve: “Since Easter 1780,” he wrote six years later to the pastor Amelung, “she had spent all her time at my home. … We were together constantly. When she was in church, I felt I had sent my eyes and all my senses with her. In a word, she was, without the consecration of a priest (forgive me this expression, my dear and excellent friend), my wife. … Great God, this celestial creature died on August 4, 1782, in the evening, just before sunset.”

Although the man of “enlightenment” was the decided adversary of the Sturm und Drang movement that at the time presided over German literature, he was from the first the most enthusiastic admirer of Jean Paul. In him, the man of science (as a professor of physics at the University of Göttingen, he was Humboldt’s teacher, and discovered that positive and negative electricity are not conducted equally in insulating materials) coexisted in perfect intimacy with the dreamer (the rationalist Lichtenberg sang the praises of Jacob Boehme, and was the first to penetrate the deep meaning of dream activity; the least we can say is that his views on the subject remain extremely current). He should be celebrated as the very prophet of chance, which Max Ernst would later call the “master of humor.” Nothing could be more symptomatic, in this regard, than to see him devote his earliest lessons to calculating probability in games of fortune.

One of the most remarkable traits of my character is surely the singular superstition by which I see everything as a premonition, and take one hundred things a day as oracles. I don’t need to describe them here: I understand what I mean all too well. Every crawling insect serves as an answer to questions about my destiny. Isn’t this strange in a physics professor?

Neither deny nor believe. … “I am confident,” he says again, “of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.”

In the white cone of his famous “smoldering candle,” we rediscover with emotion on Abel’s pastel the subtlest smile that ever there was, belonging to a precursor in every genre: one is reminded of a Paul Valéry in his early phase, as revised and corrected by Monsieur Teste (but Valéry has no more in common with Lichtenberg than the art of numbering his notebooks). Here is one of the great masters of humor. He was the inventor of this sublime philosophical inanity, which configures by absurdity the dialectical masterpiece of the object: “a knife without a blade, which is missing the handle.” In his solitude, he managed to do much more than vary the positions of love, as some men do: he described sixty-two ways of resting one’s head on one’s hand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Vermischte Schriften, 1770-1799.

BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: Aphorisms (selections). The Lichtenberg Reader.