Imagining Happiness: Literature and the Essay

Abstract

In David Malouf's essay ‘The Happy Life’ (2011), fiction occupies a central, if not entirely obvious, place. While this is hardly surprising, given Malouf's literary reputation, this focus on fiction allows me to introduce the work of the Brazilian writer, Luiz Costa Lima. The way that literature opens us to a very specific form of happiness will be my starting point and a bridge to some key moments in Costa Lima's very provocative thought which, since the publication of his first major work in 1984, explores the radical potential of literature to question and resist (social) control. Costa Lima demonstrates that literature shares an affinity with the essay, the form framed by a radical and ongoing resistance to system and finality, and he refers to this kind of resistance as ‘criticity’, a progressive, experimental drive that does not aim at a predetermined point of arrival. This brings us back, in a slow and meandering kind of way, to where we began, the form of Malouf's own meditation on happiness, the essay.

Notes

¹For introductory thoughts on the history of imagination, see Schulte-Sasse (1988: 203–225).

²The intimate link between writing and skin is explored in Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion (1987), and Montaigne makes an oblique reference to it as well, one Malouf himself cites: ‘let the rest be ours, but not joined and glued so firmly to us that it cannot be detached without taking our skin along with it, and tearing away a piece of us’ (Malouf 2011: 3).

³In this essay I explore a very specific account of happiness, one inspired by and responding to certain moments in Malouf's essay. For an overview of broader histories and accounts of happiness, see McMahon (2006), White (2006), Goodman (2010), and Colebrook (2006).

⁴Matthew Lamb provides an introduction to a special edition of Costa Lima's work over these years, designed for an English readership (2008: 3–7).

⁵Costa Lima notes Montaigne's references to his own meandering and rambling method (Costa Lima 1996 [1993]: 33, 37, 40, 55).

⁶Julio Cortázar's reference to an ‘imagination in the service of no one’ seems apposite here (Sousa 1988: xiii).

⁷Camus concludes: ‘I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy’ (1983 [1955]: 123).