Bloc experiments, Zacharias Lichter edition

This is the first of the books featured in the “Bloc experiments” series: experimental fiction out of Eastern Europe, from the 1920s to the present.

Reading The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter inevitably raises this question: How on earth did Călinescu get this past Ceaușescuist censors? There are probably two families of explanation. The first is that, published in 1969, as Romania underwent partial de-Sovietization and a period of liberalization, Lichter came out at a moment when the arts enjoyed a brief reprieve from strict state censorship. The second is that it is not easy to tell what you are supposed to make of Lichter.

The “Life and Opinions” tag of course suggests a family resemblance with Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, but the title is about all the resemblance the two works have to each other. There is no narrative in Lichter, strictly speaking, and although it sometimes digresses and sometimes goes on at length, Tristram Shandy certainly has a narrative arc. Tristram Shandy is also written in Tristram Shandy’s voice, whereas Lichter himself is not Lichter’s narrator. These two differences also are not casual differences; they are part of what makes Lichter exactly what it is.

I think, at a certain level, Lichter wants us to be distracted by the question, Who is Zacharias Lichter? as a way of masking the more fundamental question, Who could take this level of interest in him? Suppose your friend turns up 200 pages of notes on a guy who stands on the corner shouting obscenities at passersby. Even if the notes are fascinating and serve as testament to the genius of their subject, it would be worth pausing and asking your friend: Why have you done this?

The Lichter device presents a few different avenues for interpretation. One is fairly straightforward: Lichter, a sort of holy fool, serves as a covert channel for social critique, and in some cases almost transparently. And here, first of all, there is the mere fact of Lichter’s poverty, and the mere fact of presenting it in literature under Ceaușescu’s sanitizing regime. Lichter himself is quoted as saying that “people pay little attention to begging itself or to their own practical attitude towards this ever-diminishing social category with all its paradoxes” (41; emphasis in the original). As Lichter describes the violent mistreatment he suffers as a beggar (42), it’s impossible not to wonder whether, if he is a hero, Lichter’s heroism has nothing to do with his status as a thinker or guru, but consists just in his not buckling under the psychological weight of impoverishment.

Lichter as social critic

Lichter’s impoverishment is presented as “an expression of protest, a revolt against the possessive mentality that marks every constructive activity in our modern world” (26). And here notice how the view is hidden behind Lichter’s persona:

For working—Lichter explains—suddenly places you within a hierarchy. The place you hold within that hierarchy becomes your possession, which in turn presupposes accepting, even unwittingly, a system that defines you above all by your degree of participation in the sphere of having and only in a subsidiary sense in that of being, that is, in your own essence. (26; emphasis in the original)

And so on—a more or less basic critique of (wage) labor as exploitation, but, strategically, just the opinion of a fool; critique conveniently hidden behind the mask of Lichter.

Zacharias Lichter is, in a complex nod to Nietzsche, an equally complex celebration of freedom. His poverty, among other attributes, seems to have been freely chosen. In addition to biographical details suggesting an individual whose poverty is not simply a product of circumstance (among them the fact that Lichter seems to have achieved an advanced degree in philosophy), the narrator describes his poverty as a choice:

His condition therefore appears not as the result of social or psychological determinism but as a voluntary transcending of all (obvious or hidden) determinisms of possessions through a spiritual act that lifts the immediate to the plenitude of being. (29)

Perhaps the subversiveness of this passage is opaque to us, so bear in mind that the official self-interpretation of Ceaușescu’s Romania is that poverty is never chosen, always determined, and that socialism will result inevitably in its elimination, and thereby liberate humanity. Here all of those wires are crossed: Poverty is chosen precisely for its redemptive potential. Most fundamentally, the Lichterian ideal rejects and reconfigures the entire conceptual framework of Ceaușescuism: the inevitability of history, and its inevitable culmination in socialism.

In one of the last chapters, the narrator—with little more than an introductory “Lichter believes” to hide behind—argues for, or more accurately simply presents, a conception of the law that makes its application impossible (see 139–40). The idea seems to be something like this: Laws are universal (e.g., no one should kill), so their application (e.g., this particular person should not kill) amounts to principles of a different order and meaning than the laws themselves. Looked at differently, the laws I fulfill are particular (that Erick should not kill), never the law I am obligated to fulfill (that no one should kill), which I, as an individual, cannot fulfill, although—as, say, a moral subject—I must. This sort of tragic reality is of course completely destructive of the Ceaușescuist and more broadly Marxist-Leninist program, of its historical and political ideals; subversive of the very idea of legal and political obligation entirely.

More obviously Nietzschean ideas emerge in a chapter on “freedom and responsibility,” in which Lichter, here being quoted directly, articulates a version of Nietzsche’s eternal return:

“I am contemporary with our entire history. I am guilty of all the wars that bloodied the earth; I am the one who ordered all massacres, who carried out all injustices. I am, repeatedly, by virtue of the huge palingenetic force of evil, the torturer, the inquisitor, the signatory of all death sentences. . . .” (49)

And so on and so on. It’s almost a parody of Nietzsche: In lieu of the joyous acceptance of the return of the same, Lichter assumes responsibility for the eternal return of evil. More interestingly, he staunchly rejects Marxist-Leninist ideas about history and human nature. There is no progress; he is no innocent “new man” of socialism; no such renewal is possible in the Lichterian cosmos.

Nietzschean sentiments abound, and raise questions about Lichter’s status as their mouthpiece. In a later passage, for example, Lichter echoes Nietzschean views about medicine, claiming that medicine is a sort of sickness (115). It’s the kind of thought you have when you spend too much time inside; the kind of thought that compels us to ask: Are we being trolled here? Is the joke that Nietzsche is no more interesting than this fool, Lichter?

In that sense, I think you will find every critique of “the modern world” you like in here: against haste, against the regime of modern medicine, against hypocrisy, labor, consumerism, and so forth. Those critiques are well-worn and -known, and there is nothing profound about them, and to be articulated in a book published in 1969 makes them pretty late to the point. They aren’t why you should read Lichter. You should read Lichter for its meditation on the very idea, to give it a name, of interest.

Interest, interpretation, fetish

Let me stage this entire thought with the basic claim that interest always maintains a gap between the subject and the object of the interest. In the most obvious instance, there is always some gap between the person in my mind whom I love and that person herself or himself. I want to also have in the back of our minds a certain question about kitsch.

Kitsch is difficult to define, as it is, in one way, situated somewhere between bad art and mass art, and then in another way between these two poles and a third: the appropriation of kitsch as high art (e.g., Warhol, Koons). Late in Lichter we learn that the local “literary milieu” had taken an interest in Lichter “as a picturesque character, one of those ‘originals’ whose deeds or unusual turns of phrase provoke amused interest or comic surprise” (89). Then stories get told about the latest bizarre thing Lichter has been up to. This is, as it were, Lichter’s origin story as the subject of The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter. Always attempting to remain just this side of mockery, the interest in Lichter is ironic, a parody of reverence.

One way this comes out is in the author’s overinterpretation of their subject. Direct quotes of Lichter himself are often bizarre, self-contradictory tirades consistent with the possibility that Lichter has simply lost his marbles. But the author then patches them up with the aura of reason and theory, attempts to give Lichter’s actions a philosophical hue. One particularly complex instance of this comes in a chapter on “existence and property.”

The chapter begins with an analysis of Lichter’s “poverty as a work that can be understood only in relation to its ideal and perfect model, the Platonic idea of poverty,” arguing that being impoverished is not a lack for Lichter but a positive attribute, “a hypostasis of being” (24). This immediately sounds like overinterpretation, but then we find out (25) that Lichter studied philosophy, and indeed wrote a thesis on none other than Plotinus—Plotinus, that is, who defines “hypostases” as the transcendent principles of reality, and privation as the root of all evil. In Plotinus, incidentally, poverty has nothing to do with ideas and everything to do with the body. Thinkers like Plato and neo-Platonists like Plotinus view poverty as a cause tending toward (not expressive of) bad character. Hypostases in Plotinus—the one, the intellect, and the soul—are strictly ideal entities. No thinker in the neo-Platonic vein would ever think of poverty as a “hypostasis of being,” and certainly Lichter, having written his dissertation on Plotinus, would never make that sort of basic confusion. Nevertheless, we then also find out that Lichter abandoned philosophy entirely.

For all these reasons, the narrator’s attempt to construe Lichter’s poverty as commitment to a philosophical ideal makes exactly no sense. His misuse of “hypostasis” has all the marks of a tourist’s incomprehension. But Lichter is then said to have abandoned philosophy, so his commitments to any sort of ‘philosophical ideal’ are obviously questionable. In sum, the idea that Lichter, who abandoned philosophy, would be committed to poverty as an expression of a philosophical commitment to a horribly wrong application of neo-Platonic ideas could not, in fact, more exactly not make sense. The fact that Lichter himself hardly gets a word in through this whole chapter is telling.

Lichter the interpreter

If it isn’t enough that Călinescu has the narrator doing an exorbitantly botched job interpreting Lichter’s poverty as a Platonic Lebensphilosophie, he then also, in a Russian doll of kitsch-mockery, has Lichter himself doing the same with the local drunks. One in particular, the “Poet-Thug,” has a favorite poem about his penis, which Lichter describes exorbitantly as “smashing the boudoir mirrors of self-indulgence” (52). The Poet-Thug evidently mocks Lichter’s views, which offers Lichter an occasion to speak to the experience of mockery: “I delight in the cruel mockery,” he says. “At such moments I feel a highly spiritual voluptuousness” (ibid.). And he says, of the Poet-Thug:

Without knowing it, this hoodlum, brawling and obscene, prepared to spit on anything, is closer to the metaphysical condition than some subtle intellectual whose high-pitched arguments justify outworn commonplaces long defunct and therefore particularly comfortable . . . In his vast and confused revolt, he unknowingly delivers a divine message. . . . He is the annihilator of myths. (52–53)

Or, you know, he’s a drunk guy yelling at passersby about his penis.

Călinescu more or less shows us the other side of the curtain when his description of Lichter’s “only true friend” Leopold Nacht includes the recognition that “appearances . . . would justify the opinion that [he] is a poverty-stricken degenerate with a mind darkened by alcoholism” (33). He then goes on to mention that Lichter regards Nacht as “one of the great philosophers of contemporary Europe.” Later, Nacht, in a drunken fit, throws a glass at a mirror, and then stabs himself in the hand. Lichter ‘explains’:

“In attempting to break the mirror, Nacht was trying—desperately—to institute paradisiac knowledge. He wishes to break all the mirrors of the world by means of which we are condemned to guess our faces. He wanted to destroy illusion and proclaim the triumph of seeing: face to face. But he did not succeed. (118–19)

Or, you know, he got drunk, threw a glass at a mirror, and stabbed himself in the hand, and all of that for absolutely no reason.

The fact that Lichter attaches himself to drunks who hardly speak is the smaller doll inside the bigger doll of the narrator’s attachment to Lichter, who is losing or has lost his mind. In case that isn’t clear, Lichter himself describes his mortal fear of one “Doctor S.,” whom he avoids on the understanding that, if Doctor S. were to diagnose him, he would certainly end up “in a lunatic asylum” (58)—which of course is just a fancy way of saying: I am losing my mind. Fifty pages on, he also says, “I am mad, mad beyond doubt—and I am amazed that you did not notice it from the start,” in case we were still wondering (104; emphasis in the original). Just as the drunks serve as a blank canvas for Lichter’s theoretical over-indulgences, Lichter’s insanity makes him a subject ripe for the narrator’s own over-theorizing. Where the narrator interprets Lichter’s poverty as a freely chosen philosophical life project, Lichter interprets Leopold Nacht’s hand gestures as those of “a demiurge that brings forth burning comets to trace the dizzying depths of the spirit” (34). It’s kitsch turtles all the way down.

I don’t think the intent here is to be cute; the comment on interest is profound, and sad, and subversive. A critique of writing offered by Lichter includes the thought—the very 1960s–70s-literary-theory-in-Europe thought—that writing involves an element of estrangement (80ff.). The sort of estrangement and removal from its subject that is parodied loudly in Lichter is perhaps constitutive of writing itself. As writing attempts to capture the dynamic flow and life of experience in the hardened amber of language and narrative, every movement toward fidelity is simultaneously a movement away.

That distance is perhaps tragic in some instances. In others it can register a desire for escape, for revolt. Changing his mind about someone whom he believes to be “irresponsible” in his flights of imagination, Lichter once claims: “The ‘freer’ and ‘purer’ the imagination is . . . the dirtier, the filthier, the more imbued with the debris and refuse of resentment it becomes” (136). This whole theory of the dangers of imagination (136–8) could double as a theory of literature: of its power to depict what isn’t, and in this to call us to social upheaval, to change, to revolution.

We learn in the end that the book, at least in the world of the book itself, was an error, even a wrong (143ff.). Lichter is saddened by it, hurt by it, and the author even wonders whether they should burn the book. The conceit and mockery don’t survive Lichter—one more reason to see the cruel fetishization of Lichter as something Lichter is bringing to our attention.

Madness as a mirror

The evident insanity of the subject of Lichter is a bit of a double edge. On the one hand, it offers an opportunity to criticize a certain form of intellectualizing. On the other, it makes it possible to get some points in past the censors. But then, cleverly, madness explains us, as Lichter argues: “It is not we who are called to explain it but, rather, it is madness that explains us . . . . Even unknowingly, we are all simply unfoldings of madness” (104). Lichter’s madness isn’t a circus act; it’s a mirror.

A mirror of what, exactly? it’s worth asking. And, of course, there is always the point to be made that Lichter isn’t obviously an endorsement of the Lichterian. Lichter’s beliefs are not holy writ. But consider the structural affinity of Lichter’s overinterpretations and the narrator’s. Lichter’s madness is a mirror to the sort of elevation or spiritualization of the mundane that is Lichter’s (the novel’s) precondition. But if Lichter is, say, satirical, what is it satirizing? Here I think it’s important to consider that, for all its departure, or suggested departure, from Marxist-Leninist and/or Ceaușescuist ideals, Lichter and Lichter propose nothing, certainly nothing of a political sort, in lieu of those ideals. Lichter hardly manages to be a narrative at all; Lichter accomplishes nothing, overcomes nothing, is no hero. There is no politics, there is no historical idea. Lichter doesn’t reject the Marxist-Leninist-Ceaușescuist ideals in favor of others; Lichter rejects the very possibility of such ideals tout court.

(As an aside, however, it is interesting that the one, or an, exception to this is a story told about Lichter serving as Nacht’s interpreter; see 85, for example. In other words, friendship seems to survive Lichter’s destruction of the possibility of meaning.)

Perhaps one mirror reflection to consider, then, is that of Lichter’s and the narrator’s overinterpretations as a mock-up of the tendency to spiritualize the material. Lichter thus carries out, in miniature, the ahistorical upshot of the rejection of ideas about the relation between humanity and its material conditions. In the end, when Lichter expresses his hurt at the writing of Lichter, Lichter the character and Lichter the narrator’s production collapse into tragicomical acceptance of failure, a willing residence in the miserable gloom of it all, and perhaps it’s this gloom that Lichter is attempting to turn our attention to: no progress, no narrative arcs, no redemption; only ‘style’, personae, hoarse shouting into the void. Lichter’s madness then serves less as a direct reflection of “all of us,” and more an indirect reflection of the gloom that surrounds us all. We’re in the mirror, and maybe not as Lichters, but all set against the same bleak landscape in the background.

Coda: On interest and surveillance

I feel virtually no confidence making value judgments about poetry in translation (that’s like three steps past any sort of judgment I’d be willing to make), but I’m nevertheless going to lead this final reflection with the thought that all of the poems in Lichter are bad.

We learn that the biographer (the narrator) collected them, or at least one of them, in the trash, and by the ending of Lichter, of course, we learn that any Lichterian material, spoken or written, has been taken from Lichter against his wishes.

I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much that the poems are bad to make this point: that the narrator’s collection of Lichter’s poetry mimics the sort of surveillance, and inversely depicts the grounds of paranoia, pervasive in Bloc states. There is the more politically neutral characterization, consistent with the fetishization point described above, of the narrator’s trash collection as a form of literary ‘salvage operation’. But then there is this startling coincidence: The elevation of kitsch—of, in this case, actual trash, which may also be very bad poetry—is substantially identical with the operation of state surveillance.

By throwing his poetry out, Lichter—in the clearest exemplification of his poverty-as-freedom ideal—frees himself of his thoughts, of his art, of language, of the association with that work as property. The narrator then deprives him of this radical gesture, not only by taking it but by investing it anew with the status of property; it is Lichter’s, and in turn Lichter is made to belong to it. There are competing conceptions of ‘holiness’ here: the Lichterian ideal, of radical self-denial, of the refusal to belong, to have or to be a meaning; and the narrator’s, which comes out exactly the other way around, of constructing meaning, of ‘critique’, of putting everything in its place in the broader tapestry of history and of the history of ideas—in short, holiness as a species of domination.

But perhaps the poetry’s being bad is what saves it.

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The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter was translated by Adriana Călinescu and Breon Mitchell in 2018 and published by NYRB.