The Necessity of Saying
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The Necessity of Saying
'The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter' by Matei Călinescu
“All people are clowns—Zacharias Lichter maintains—yet few achieve a metaphysical knowledge of their condition.”
Matei Călinescu, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter
The cleverness of this slight novel reveals itself through the long-winded telling of what turns out to be an inside joke. The joke not told so much as it is realized, unfolding through a diverse array of seemingly senseless, nearly headache-inducing mini philosophical treatises and poetic excerpts.
These fragments have been assembled by an unnamed biographer ostensibly meaning to document a man named Zacharias Lichter. But this biographer performs his task poorly, and by the end of the book Lichter remains a contradictory, capricious, and ultimately ungraspable figure. At first, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter seemingly fails in that very key biographical element of individual revelation and explanation. Seen more fully, however, the same excruciating philosophy which often confuses more than it reveals is in effect a tool of philosophical genius. In all, by the unnamed biographer’s failure to capture the individual of Lichter, Călinescu simultaneously succeeds in describing the Individual.
The work is better understood as a set of incoherent essays, some more coherent than others, that somehow achieve coherence as a whole. This eventual clarity is not a result that is completely outlandish on the first glance, however, similar to how a cloud-covered sunset is disappointing but exudes a sense that it is worth coming back to another night, a feeling only possible with some inclination as to what the clouds conceal. Călinescu subtly infuses a trust that the sun is behind the clouds, then pulls them away.
Indeed, the punch line—revealed to those that have bravely withstood the entirety of this directionless narrative and chosen to gaze at the sunset another night—is that this unnerving perplexity has really been the point all along and that there is remarkable sense to the Zacharias Lichter’s senselessness.
Matei Călinescu, a Romanian scholar and author, was born in 1934 and began his academic career at a Romanian university in the early 1950s. He would spend the rest of his life in academia, even through defecting to the United States in 1973, where he accepted a professorship at Indiana University Bloomington and remained until his death in 2009. Although Călinescu was a prolific writer, with a reported 16-volume edition of his selected works said to be in progress, his only book widely available is The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter, which while first published in 1969 was only translated into English for the first time in 2018.
The novel is inextricably tied to the country and regime that Călinescu had fled from. Zacharias Lichter reflects Călinescu's experiences living under the repressive authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu. The mystery and obscurity that the novel is steeped in, while certainly an artistic technique, is at least partly due to the conditions of censorship under which it was created. In fact, Zacharias Lichter was so enigmatic that it fooled the censors, who initially allowed it to be published simply because they were unable to comprehend it.
The novel’s entire cast jointly contributes to the ambiguity of the work. Details put forward by the biographer are quickly retracted by Lichter. For example, when the biographer suggests Lichter to be a societal vagrant, describing him as a prophet-clown and a beggar, Lichter is quick to deny this characterization and further, prevent any future charges by completely renouncing his unique identity completely. To this end, Lichter considers the antithetical position of being all or none, that is, everybody or nobody, ”I am contemporary with our entire history,” he announces, “I am guilty of all the wars that have bloodied the earth; I am the one who ordered all massacres, who carried out all injustices.” Throughout the novel there is an enduring conflict between the attempt to place Lichter and the absurdity of attempting to do so.
Here we must consider the context in which Călinescu is writing: a regime that seeks to suppress all forms of dissent and non-conformity through censorship. With the presence of these censors in mind, Lichter's implausible professions can be seen as a defense against the simplistic binary categorization of individuals as either for or against the regime, as guilty or not-guilty. By refusing to be neatly categorized, Lichter challenges the very logic of authoritarianism and affirms the complexity and nuance of individual identity. Indeed, there is a certain innocence of a man that admits to a thousand crimes and a guilt to one that confesses to none.
The elusiveness of Lichter's character can be seen as a form of resistance against the regime's attempt to categorize and control. No, Lichter will neither be pigeon-holed nor even allow himself to be capable of being categorized. ”I have managed to turn my own face into a mask,” Lichter declares. The significance of the work lies not only in this mask but also in the congenial uniqueness and common complexity of the face that it conceals.
But this mask is not worn without difficulty. Zacharias Lichter exists—and suffers—in a web of theory of his own weaving. To read on any myriad of topics (The Revelations of Begging, On the Stages of the Spiritual, A Poem Tossed into the Trash Bin of a Public Garden by Zacharias Lichter and Retrieved by his Biographer) is to seemingly enter the middle of a Hegelian argument that has not been introduced and will never be concluded. Lichter is both the spider and the caught fly; he is both the creator of the theoretical trap and a victim of their impractical applications.
Still, these consequences are necessary. It is this complex web that protected the novel against its censors, who in trying to figure out exactly what it meant did not recognize it to be an intentional trap and only became more and more wound in it. We readers are other caught flies caught in the web too, though we need not be stuck. When we stop reading like a censor does, by avoiding the constant search for meaning, we can allow the novel to proceed and eventually recognize the entirety of the web as being quite beautiful. ‘I don’t get it’ rhymes with ‘are we there yet’ and squirming in misunderstanding only results in further entanglement.
Such an attitude has been a subtle lesson that Călinescu has been delivering all along. “The desire to analyze someone, anyone at all, is a wish to kill that person” Lichter warns, “In the moral order, the analyst is the vampire, a genius of crime.” To Lichter, to analyze is to kill, as ‘to define is to limit.’ Many are guilty of the crime of analysis (or at least of its intent, since most people lack the means to carry it out).” Lichter not only warns against analysis but finds our knives to be dull in the first place.
There is a fine Jewish proverb: Man thinks, God laughs…It pleases me to think that the art of the novel came into the world as the echo of God’s laughter. But why does God laugh at the sight of man thinking? Because man thinks and the truth escapes him.
Milan Kundera
At the crux of all this confused philosophy is a fake philosopher. The mocking tale of Leopold Nacht, Lichter’s best friend, serves as a defensive warning against the vanity of compartmentalization. In Nacht, Călinescu’s biographer describes a man at the unexpected meeting point of perfect rationality and perfect irrationality. Nacht’s disorderliness, drunkenness, belligerence, and regular intervals of silence due to frequent bouts of unconsciousness are concurrently taken as a possible foundation to a great, coherent philosophy. “In spite of appearances—which would justify the opinion that Leopold Nacht is a poverty-stricken degenerate with a mind darkened by alcoholism—Zacharias Lichter (in fact the only man with whom Poldy [Nacht] condescends to talk at greater length) considers him one of the great philosophers of contemporary Europe and, moreover, one of the very few that come near the experience of true perplexity.”
Leopold Nacht’s actions and inactions are that of either a philosophical maestro or a pitiful alcoholic, either by brilliance or imbecility, just how a quadratic equation can yield x to equal 2 or -2. At times, his actions seem baffling and self-destructive, such as when he stabs his own hand with a knife having wrongfully taken it for a loaf of bread. However, Lichter chooses to view Nacht's behaviour through a lens of admiration and respect. Even in instances where Nacht's actions seem incomprehensible, Lichter sees a deeper meaning. For example, he interprets Nacht's self-inflicted injury not as a drunken mistake, but as an existential reckoning. According to Lichter, "Nacht's failure must have seemed absolute. That is why he felt the need to punish himself, to thrust the knife through the hand that failed…"
“Spoken language may draw near to perplexity and-ideally-even partake in it. As far as I know, however, only the silence of Leopold Nacht is in it.”
Matei Călinescu, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter
The genesis of Nacht's silence—whether it is chosen as a token to the sacredness of language or merely forced by the preventative aspects of intoxication—is a crucial aspect of his character, and of Lichter's interpretation of him. Lichter is keen to take the former view, “His entire existence is a meditation, a meditation whose ultimate conclusion is absolute muteness, beyond speech or refusal of speech.” This blind appreciation of Nacht and positive spin on his every action is suggestive of how a follower would defend a dictator. The satirical angle of Nacht touches on Călinescu’s preoccupations of who we revere, who gets to speak, who is heard without speaking, who speaks without being heard, and who is simply silent, as well as the theme of silence, in general.
“But our fate is to talk, talk, talk without end—silence itself becomes a word like any other.”
Matei Călinescu, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter
Lichter makes clear that ‘simply silent’ is an oxymoron, that silence contains a lot more than the absence of noise. Lichter explains Christ’s silence towards Pilate as one of the most poignant speeches ever recorded, “Christ’s silence at that moment is the deepest eulogy of questions ever given.” And Lichter proves this belief in the virtue of silence thoroughly, however at odds it may put him with the world. For example, Lichter refuses to announce his innocence when he is detained by police on the accusation of theft, maintaining that—in a way that Bartleby never expressed but perhaps would have assented to—while being unjustly accused was disagreeable, having to uphold one’s innocence is entirely more unpleasant. “Did you steal?” Lichter is asked, “It is possible that I stole and equally possible that I did not,” he answers, “Claiming one’s innocence (no matter how justified) is ultimately demeaning because it always seems distracted by a cowardly acceptance of the accuser’s criteria.”
Zacharias Lichter intentionally reduces itself into its sought after senses of both absurdity and of a particular disposition of silence through a consistently followed pattern of escape and return. Călinescu repeatedly illustrates a building of knowledge and a swift clearing of what has just been erected. It has been said that if in one moment we begin to know Lichter, the next any understanding is taken away. Not everything is removed by this process, however. On the contrary, the exercise can unexpectedly be quite constructive.
Take the following explanation on the progress of intelligence, “Zacharias Lichter naturally concludes that true intelligence evolves within a vicious circle, forever fantasizing escape yet forever falling back into the realization that all efforts at escape are futile.” Here we recall Eliot’s infamous lines on human exploration
, and refract them to fit the frame of a foolish flight rather than of a pure, though ultimately misguided curiosity. But the flight is still revelatory, not only merely despite its foolishness but perhaps because of it.Each time Lichter tries to escape, no matter to the seaside or to the high air, like an inverse Hans Castorp, he quickly returns back further into himself, wishing to pursue adventure only in his own mind. Lichter does not fail such a test of recognition as Eliot does when he says we return with a sense of knowing the place for the first time. Lichter requires his character to travel on no journey to find itself. “The pleasure of travel,” Lichter says, “is one of the most pernicious forms of self-indulgence.”
But even if little is left of it, Lichter has nevertheless made a journey and something has been uncovered by it. This effect is apparent also in Lichter’s desire to tear up his own writing and only write in the first place in order to discard his bothersome poetic impulses. “Zacharias Lichter wrote rarely; a poem he’d been carrying about in his head for a long time or a stray, stubborn thought that threatened to become a poem.” Lichter treats literary inspiration not something to engage in but as a feeling to get rid of. Nonetheless, the convergent paths of artistic inspiration and artistic output cannot be grown over; they are forever strewn with footsteps.
The biographer expands, “Perhaps [Lichter] wrote to “free” himself…writing for him was no so much an act of expression as a desire to sweep away some prior, overly crystallized form of expression, to dissolve and wash it from his memory in order to return to what, in Lichterian terms, one might call creative forgetting.” Despite Lichter’s wishes there is a meaningful difference between someone who has destroyed everything they have created and someone who has never written created. ‘Creative forgetting’ is a contradiction—we can not choose to forget. And ‘manuscripts don’t burn,' as Bulgakov says.
And this fact is ultimately admitted by Lichter. When Lichter accosts the biographer when he learns of his illicit project, the biographer asks Lichter if he should burn the manuscript. No, Lichter maintains, “Once things have reached this point, there is nothing to be done. Your book will exist, even if no one reads it, even if you burn it. Your sin was to write it, my sin to inspire it—and such sins cannot be erased. They can only be acknowledged, in pain and fear.”
“Don’t you see that my ‘biography’ is the last thing that could possibly be written?”
Matei Călinescu, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter
The book fights uphill to bring itself against the explicit wishes of its protagonist into existence. As much as he can deny his own individuality, Lichter remains an individual. As much as Lichter can claim not to exist, he does. As much as he desires the biography not to exist—as much as he believes that writing a biography of him is a sin and that analysis in general is a criminal act—it does. And it is here that we can employ Lichter’s own words against him, perhaps just as Călinescu has done and defend ourselves against the charge of analysis by not cowardly accepting the accuser’s criteria and resoundingly speak for Lichter anyway.
Within this resolute, decisive acknowledgement of Lichter lies the novel’s greatest virtue: the endorsement of the Individual and individual diversity. Through Zacharias Lichter, Lichter’s life—and perhaps Călinescu’s also—are not allowed to pass quietly as they otherwise would have done. The novel is a burning flame lit within the suffocating sheet of insignificance that history is usually able to drape over the quiet, quirky men of the world. Zacharias Lichter and the haphazard biography it is formed of stands proudly against the loud, undeserving dictators, the squeaky wheels of history that—quite literally, in recent times—get all the oil.
Besides, to try to analyze the unanalyzable is not only human but also democratic. There is nothing thought to be unknown and certainly nothing that can be admitted to be absurd in authoritarian regimes. The true crime of analysis is that it must be committed, lest it is committed for us. No matter that the pursuit of knowledge often leads to dead ends, or paradox, or mystery, as Lichter believes, “The acquisition of authentic knowledge always ends in paradox and mystery.” What individual contains an internal logic that is anything else but half-insane and otherwise disordered? Ontologically confused beings gain nothing by trying to avoid or otherwise suppress ontological confusion. The acquisition of paradox and mystery cannot be said to be a failure; it should only be said to be human. All those dead ends aren’t really dead.
“What one says is imbued with the sense of what cannot be said.”
Matei Călinescu, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter
Ultimately, we are fortunate for the biographer’s sin, especially on behalf of those who would otherwise choose to remain silent and traditionally live and die quietly. It is a great drawback of the world—our world still—that we only hear those who speak the loudest. In one final accusation, Lichter accuses his biographer of not only writing about him but about himself too. But this is a great compliment; the biographer has seen not only Lichter’s mask but the face partially concealed by it as well. Lichter has put up his hand, or had his hand raised, and has said, “I am here. I have lived.”
In the end, we find ourselves to be alive too. And if the silence of Leopold Nacht is in it, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter becomes in it too, whatever it is. After a temporary moment of bewildered silence that follows the hallowed conclusion of the novel’s final syllable, we unwittingly break into a slow-building laughter, looking over one shoulder and then the other to see others overcoming the same initial trepidation and looking over their shoulders too. Is this not the most pure form of laughter? Is it not the laughter that only those at liberty enough to laugh at absurdity and not try to have it killed or imprisoned? Yes, the inside joke is that the biographer has not failed. And how fitting should it be that the novel in which he doesn’t say anything (and in saying nothing, says much) should be Călinescu’s most resounding, lasting, and necessary word.
“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time”
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding