Imagining Happiness: Literature and the Essay

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.