Page 38 - WTP Vol. IX #6

Unfair (continued from preceding page)
back at Barthelme’s story. The character called irony an “amazing magical power.” I wondered whether I could use this “magical power” to cure Keren. That was what she needed: a cure. And here was this magi- cal power that I could administer to her. What Keren needed was a good dose of irony.
~
When my wife came home I told her about what I’d read and said we needed to go pick up Keren and show her a good time. “Not just any good time,” I said, “she needs an ironic time. The only question is how to pull it off.”
My wife said she wasn’t quite sure what I meant, but anything distracting was worth trying, even if all it did was put a smile on Keren’s face. But it turned out that now was not the right time. She’d actually spoken to Keren that morning, she said, and Keren’s mother had picked up the phone, saying that Keren had just re- turned from another round of chemotherapy, and was reacting stronger than usual to the drugs. My wife said she’d get back in touch in a few days to see how Keren was feeling—and told me that, until then, we would have to sit tight with our idea and hope for the best.
My wife went to the living room to rest after a long day at the clinic, and I went to the kitchen to make us some food after a long day at my desk. It was hard to accept the idea that there was nothing we could do for Keren—not even to drive over and distract her for a while. And yet, I thought, maybe the fact that she was reacting so strongly to the medication meant that it was doing something, that the drugs, though destructive, were also giving her life—like irony.
I was tearing lettuce, cutting cucumbers, rinsing radishes, spreading sprouts, but in my mind I kept thinking about irony—and its positive effects. Was there an ironic element to medicine? Was it possible that Keren was experiencing ironic response? That it would even help her heal?
As we ate dinner—a big salad, some cheeses, sliced of bread—I asked my wife what she thought was going
to happen to Keren. She said it was hard to tell. She’d seen a few colleagues at the hospital fall sick with ovarian cancer, and several of them didn’t even make it through treatment. She’d seen a few get through treat- ment successfully and then go into remission without any more success. She called it a “bad cancer”—though what she considered a “good cancer” was hard to say.
I said that it all sounded pretty scary. She she it did— because it was—and that she’d wanted to visit Keren before this last cycle, and that she was a little mad
that we hadn’t managed to get out there. She said we had to make sure and to see her before the next cycle. I told her I agreed and that we’d go as soon as Keren was feeling better. She said she’d call Keren in a few days and tell me as soon as she was able to see people again.
~
I sunk back into my work. I began to think a lot about Barthelme’s use of the word unfair. His character says Kierkegaard is “unfair” to Schlegel and also says he can provide some proof for this opinion. But then he says that, really, Kierkegaard is being fair to Schlegel, and that it’s he, the character, who’s unfair to Kierkeg- aard. He says he’s trying, in his words, to “annihilate” Kierkegaard “in order to deal with his disapproval”— not of Schlegel, he says, but of himself. What he means is that, in reading Kierkegaard, the character feels
not that Schlegel is misjudged, but that he himself is cosmically misjudged by Kierkegaard. He obviously says all this with a heavy dose of irony—but what he wants to express is actually pretty basic: he identifies with Schlegel. In this way he also steals the show. He becomes the victim in the story.
I wondered what might be it about Schlegel that the character in the story identify with so strongly—so
I looked a little into his life. It turned out that he’d suffered unfair criticism not only from Kierkegaard, who’d published his thesis years after Schlegel’s death, but also from the one and only Hegel, who’d published his lectures on the history of philosophy while Schlegel was still alive. Hegel attacked Schlegel for corrupting the concept of irony for an entire gen- eration—essentially turning it into a joke. Hegel want- ed to preserve the tragic element in irony, which he saw as part of its its moral essence, but Schlegel, if you really read him, hadn’t really denied the destructive or
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