Page 37 - WTP Vol. IX #6

ject of my article, and the research was affecting me in a way I couldn’t control.
~
This went on for a couple of weeks—the book is 332 pages of doctoral text translated from the Dan- ish—and as the days went on, I felt more and more like the only thing we can know about life is that it’s ironic. And I don’t mean ironic in the sense that 1990s culture was ironic. This wasn’t about a kind of indif- ference that made life bearable—which was, I admit, maybe what I’d hoped to find in the book when I set out to read it after hearing of Keren’s cancer. This
was irony as perpetual imbalance. I realized that the so-called indifference that many people my age were supposed to have felt toward our so-called lives was a kind of a cover-up for a discomfort over the fact that things just didn’t add up. We’d reached the postmod- ern era, with technology thrusting us into the infor- mation age before we even knew it was coming, and yet our minds hadn’t even succeeded in coping with changes that had taken place in the industrial era over a century before. We were still mesmerized by mov- ing images—and already the internet had swallowed up and regurgitated film at a pace beyond anything anyone could have fathomed. And this had already started when people still used phone lines to connect to the internet.
It was around this time that my wife and I finally made it out of Jerusalem for a visit to the Yaffo flea market, where we sometimes go for breakfast on Friday mornings. On the way back, we stopped by the moshav where Keren grew up and where she was now back living with her parents. I knew we were going
to see someone in the midst of chemotherapy, but I’d had no idea how seeing Keren—whom I’d only experi- enced as an energetic young person—after having lost so much hair and weight... I had no clue just how sad
it would be to see her that way. More than anything,
I think, it was difficult to see how slow she was. Her mind, her body, they didn’t work as fluidly as they had before, they didn’t have the same rhythm. She was re- covering from the treatments and fighting the disease. She could barely talk—so we just sat with her, drank tea, and kept telling her that we loved her. What else could we do?
~
I went back to Barthelme. He quoted Kierkegaard’s critique of Schlegel’s Lucinde as being too poetical to really convey the “deep pain” of reality—which is something he says is also accomplished by irony.
Bartheleme’s character, who is ostensibly speaking
to some sort of therapist, himself states that irony “deprives the object of its reality” which is why it
is “destructive.” But then this character admits that he’s oversimplified Kierkegaard’s account of irony. I thought, recalling what I’d read, that it was much more than an oversimplification. It was a misrepresentation. Irony, regardless of what Kierkegaard said, was not simply a destructive force in his work. It was also what drove his writing.
This is how I saw it: Kierkegaard had written an en- tire book on irony. No matter how many times he called it destructive, as a concept, irony gave him
a way of developing his understanding about the world. He read about Socrates and filled his mind with images of this so-called wise man at the same time that he sharpened his analytical perspective on his reality. On the one hand, he said irony deprived objects of reality, but on the other, he needed it in order to define his own relationship to that same re- ality. Irony, no matter how destructive he said it was, no matter how negatively he saw it, was also what helped him enter his own reality as a thinker and writer. Irony, it stood to reason, gave him life.
I remember I wrote down these words in my notes and then got up and walked away from my desk.
How could it be, I wondered, that something that de- stroyed you could also give you life? That something which deprived you of your reality could, at the same time, also define that reality? And what did this mean for people like me? Or my wife? Or Keren? Was her cancer ironic? No—it was real. No irony could deny her cancer. And yet, if it did, would it actually give her life?
I didn’t have answer to this so question so I looked
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