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The more I think about Gert Hofmann’s Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl (my review here), the more sure I am that it will be on my year-end best list. I loved that charming and yet dark book. Consequently, I’ve been slowly getting my hands on more of Hofmann’s work, which has been translated sporadically by various publishers over the past thirty years. In this quest, I was excited to see that one of Hofmann’s books was inspired by a Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting The Blind Leading the Blind. Thanks in part to Michael Frayn’s fantastic Headlong, which was on my year-end best list last year (my review of Headlong here; my 2010 year-end best list here), I couldn’t resist reading Hofmann’s The Parable of the Blind (Der Blindensturz, 1985; tr. from the German by Christopher Middleton, 1986).
First things first:
On the day when we’re to be painted — yet another new day! — a knocking on the barn door drags us out of our sleep.
Just reading that simple opening sentence about “the knocker” reminded me of one of the things I liked best about Hofmann’s style in Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl: there’s an unabashed use of exclamation marks that lightens to the point of exuberance the tone of what might otherwise be very depressing. It’s an emotional mix of humor and seriousness that makes that book transcendent, and this first sentence in this book had me hoping for much the same thing here. I wasn’t disappointed.
The speaker – that “we” – is a group of blind men who wander from town to town. Hofmann establishes their blind perspective right away:
Around us thick soft flakes of snow, clearly remembered, are falling into the gentle folds of the countryside and burying everything: the plow, the weeds, the trees, as well as all the other things we gave up long ago, but which probably still exist.
The word “probably” gets repeated over and over, much as “And then?” did in Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl. It’s a constant reminder that even while we are reading about what’s happening in the physical world, the person speaking is seeing complete blackness. Neither we readers nor the speakers are actually seeing what’s going on, but somehow it is being conveyed. Or, at least, something is being conveyed.
In fact, these blind men aren’t sure of much of anything (though I’m not saying this is the conventional “unreliable narrator”; it’s much more about the transfer through words or images than about the reliability of the speaker). For example, these men aren’t even sure of each other. They are led by one who, probably, can see well enough to distinguish light from dark. We have reason to suspect otherwise. One among them was blinded unnaturally, probably for punishment, and has taken the place of one who died – they figure they will probably push him in a ditch and leave him some day
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One of the biggest questions they have is why the painter would be interested in painting them. No one really knows. Even the beloved knocker (the kind-ish man who woke them up and eventually took them to a rather humiliating breakfast) cannot fathom why anyone would want to paint them. Others are downright mean and dismissive:
And then the man who isn’t the knocker suddenly flies into a rage and jumps around on the ground in front of us. Perhaps because we mistook him for the knocker, perhaps for another reason. And he shouts that it’s wrong to talk with us and to be concerned with us and to let us run around because we bring disorder into everything, thoughts, people, the air. And that we trample down everything that’s in our way. Look at them, he exclaims, and probably he’s pointing at us.
At once we think we might be standing among flowers and we step back, but aren’t certain if we’re stepping out of one lot of flowers into another.
The story progresses as these blind men try to find the painter’s house. As you might imagine, it’s not a pleasant journey. Of course, Hofmann’s prose style leavens the seriousness of what’s going on as these men are subjected to one humiliation after another. That’s not to say the tone is always comic: “How often we tell ourselves: Let’s just go to sleep! — and forget that we’re already asleep.” And the best is when the comic and the dark come together in fine long passages, like this one when they finally get to the painter’s:
The painter, who probably noticed us at once and is probably striding up and down by the probably wide-open window of his house, says — we can’t hear it all — that he’s always been surrounded by whole spaces full of pictures, afflicted by them. These spaces, he says, come to me, they come into my house. These are the spaces in which he lives, though of course there are also the other ones. How many times he’s sat, especially on the long winter evenings, in the middle of those spaces and the pictures have shown him the world. More and more often now, since the slaughter at Liège, the pictures are of people dying and dead. The pictures in these spaces, now without a sky, with a high horizon, are all filled, to the limit of the frame, gold, my good friend, with images of people and things dying, perishing, or dead already. All in extremis, he says. Like these here, he adds and probably points out through the window, thus probably at us.
Asking the blind men to practice stumbling and then falling into a ditch (over and over again) so he can get the interior of their mouths correct, even the master, who offers them this great honor, is cruel and then dismissive.
This is a strange book filled with a bleak outlook on these outwardly jovial men who live in total darkness and alienation. Certainly, the terror is expressed as well here as it is in the visual art by Bruegel himself.
That said, I liked it much less than Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl, which in general I found to be both more vivacious and more bleak. This is certainly a good read, though, and I recommend it.
I have been meaning to read the late Gert Hofmann’s Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl (Kleine Stechardin, 1994; tr. from the German by Michael Hofmann, 2004) ever since John Self reviewed it on his blog (click here for his review). John’s review spoke of charm, yet, mixed in the review, is a disturbing premise. Charming and disturbing? Why did I take my time getting around to it? Whatever the reason for my procrastination, I recommend you don’t wait. Now that I’ve read it, I feel pity for that alternative life I would have led had I not.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
“Once, many many years ago . . .” is the soft opening to the book about the real historic figure Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799). In his afterword, Michael Hofmann (the author’s son and translator) says we might be forgiven for not knowing who Lichtenberg was since it is likely we would only know if we were “a Germanist, a lover of aphorisms, or a student of ur-science.” In 1763, Lichtenberg arrived at Göttingen University where he was a physics professor until his death, though he has no major accomplishments to his name. This book gives a comical account of one of his failed experiments when he inflated a balloon indoors, but it was too big to take outdoors where he planned to use it as a transportation device — something already invented by others — and, consequently, “Lichtenberg was left sitting with his balloon in his lecture room.”
My own knowledge of Lichtenberg before reading this was limited to the fact that NYRB Classics published The Waste Book, a collection of those aphorisms Michael Hofmann mentions. I haven’t read The Waste Booksbut I’m now tempted because this book uses them liberally. Lichtenberg was apparently a clever man and took pride in it, carrying around a pencil to copy down and refine his wit.
“In case Heaven should really consider it necessary to withdraw me from circulation and put out a new version,” he wrote to his friend Polycarp Erxleben (1744 – 1777), “I would like to give it one or two bits of advice, in particular concerning the form of my body and the overall design of the whole thing. Straighter,” he wrote, “altogether straighter!”
Why straighter? I’m getting ahead of myself, and perhaps to the detriment of this book. After all, perhaps the idea of reading a book about an eighteenth-century scientist and aphorist sounds a bit dry. I should retreat a bit and allow Lichtenberg to be introduced the way Hofmann introduces him:
As he scrambled around among the chair legs, one thing became clear: he had a hunchback! Quick, let’s write about it!
The hunchback was enormous!
As you can see, that this book may be stodgy should not be a concern. Hofmann’s presentation is whimsical and vivacious, chuck-full of exclamation points (which I never, here, tired of). Whoever the narrator is, the thrill he gets telling the story is contagious as he brings the reader into the narrative, always assuming our next question: “And then?”
As the story begins, we feel sorry for Lichtenberg. He’s in his thirties but is a feeble wreck of a man:
“My poor spirit happens to have been poured into a miserable vessel,” he wrote to Alessandro, Count Volta (1745 – 1827).
His hunchback, in particular, is a constant embarrassment. He dreads going to his classes, knowing that everyone’s attention is on his hunchback, not on physics. As much as he wants to be social, he can’t stand the thought that his hunchback is always between him and his friends.
He wished they wouldn’t insist on touching it. It made him feel terribly impatient, later sad.
Of course, he saves himself with some cleverness:
“The only manly attribute I have, decency unfortunately prevents me from displaying.”
What Lichtenberg wants more than anything, though, is love. He adores females of any age; he comes off every bit as lusty as he does witty. Any dread that his hunchback instills in him is almost eclipsed if a woman is giving him a bit of attention. Nevertheless, he knows he is repulsive. One day, though, Lichtenberg’s time comes:
Shortly thereafter, Lichtenburg wrote a letter — still preserved — to his schoolfriend, the pastor Gottfried Hieronymus Amelung (1742 – 1800). “Just imagine,” he wrote, “something has happened, all of a sudden! I’ve met a girl, a girl, a girl, a girl! — the daughter of someone in the town. [Here he was lying through his teeth, she wasn't a burgher's daughter at all, she was way below!] She is thirteen, and, I have to say, beautiful. I have never seen such a picture of beauty and gentleness. She was in a group of five or six others, doing what children do here, selling flowers up on the wall to passersby. [. . .]“
And then?
Well, said Lichtenberg, and then indeed.
Soon the little flower girl, Maria Stechard (Hofmann often calls her the Stechardess) has moved in with Lichtenberg, to Lichtenberg’s absolute joy, and he becomes a subject of gossip (as, we are assured, were many others in that day):
In Göttingen — pop. 10,000 — there were no secrets. One person yanked another around the corner, and the whispering began. Often enough, the subject was Dr. Lichtenberg and the beautiful child.
For some time, the Stechardess and Lichtenberg live together in innocence. She is an object of contemplation for him, and he is just a kind malformed man for her. Nevertheless, we know Lichtenberg’s heart, and the seduction begins. Though it is clumsy and, for all its shamefulness to us today, funny, it is an ugly moment. Here sit Lichtenberg and the Stechardess one quiet evening:
When the sun’s gone down, he said, I don’t know if you’ve observed this too, the world is changed. Even the people are different. In their houses they move closer together and speak more quietly, as though they don’t want to be heard. They sit by the stove. The old women cross themselves and sigh a lot. All because of the darkness, better termed blackness, said Lichtenberg, and the pair of them ate. He looked towards the Stechardess and had sinful thoughts, his face turning red. The Stechardess lowered her eyes. Ah yes, he said.
There’s some marvelous control and pacing in that passage. We can feel night dropping in the silence as the evening becomes much more grave for both Lichtenberg and the Stechardess. It serves to note, also, the lack of the exlamation point, used so often elsewhere. And then, in one simple paragraph, this:
Don’t hurt me, she said.
The entire book, though it is funny — and charming, don’t forget charming — throughout, contains such grave undercurrents. Lichtenberg is practically a failure and he’s already contemplating the fact that when he is swallowed up by the grave so are his memories (making his deceased parents, he thinks, truly dead). He’s already fairly certain that he has achieved nothing of note that will merit remembrance. And death is all around. Good healthy friends and students are absent the next day, death having visited them inexplicably in the night.
And Hofmann keeps the flow of time ambiguous, despite the consistent “And then?” that moves the story from one scene to the next: “It was summer again — or was it still summer?” A great book, worthy of remembrance.
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