Page 39 - WTP Vol. IX #6

ethical elements of irony. He’d just suggested that they had positive effects too. Tragedy, after all, can also make us laugh. Not because tragic events are funny. Because they’re sometimes also ironic. It’s not joy that always makes us laugh. Sometimes it’s also pain.
The character in Barthelme’s story related to Schlegel, I began to think, because of the unfair treatment he received from everyone. All he wanted, at the end of the day, was to live his life according to his own no- tions. He wasn’t trying to do all the things that Hegel and Kierkegaard said he was doing. He was just being himself. And being criticized for being himself—which was unfair. But then, I thought, life is unfair. So, in a way, this story is about what it’s like to be alive.
And I couldn’t help, then, but to think about Keren again. Life was unfair. Why did she have to get cancer? Why did she have to feel so sick after each treatment? Why did she have to have an ovary removed? How would it affect her future attempts at getting preg- nant? It wasn’t just Kierkegaard or Hegel—or even Schlegel—who was unfair. It was life.
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This, I decided, would be the topic for my article—so I started writing. It was summer, I wasn’t teaching, and my entire days were spent poring over secondary texts on Barthelme and Schlegel and Hegel. I wanted to try and understand the reality around this so-called unfairness. Schlegel, it turned out, had an affair with
a married Jewish woman who had a son, and who later divorced her husband and married Schlegel. That wasn’t very fair for the husband—but maybe it was fair for the wife. Either way, it would have made Schlegel an easy target for Hegel, not just because of his ideas on irony, but also because he’d had an affair with a married woman and then entered into a mixed marriage between a Christian and a Jew.
Divorce, it occurred to me, was something that could have made Barthelme identify with Schlegel. He’d been married four times and, I sensed, used irony to hide a kind of innate anxious romanticism—a hope for a better world that actually rooted in a fear of reality. Kierkegaard refused to marry his beloved— he broke off his engagement and was likely celibate until he died at the relatively young age of forty- two. Kierkegaard would have found plenty to criti- cize about the romantic life led by Schlegel—who, incidentally, at the age of fifty-six, can also be con- sidered to have died relatively young. All these men were basically being unfair to each other for living differently from one another.
It was strange, but though I could hardly relate, I
didn’t feel critical of them. I was on my first marriage, my wife and I did not yet have children, I had never had an affair and, at least as far as I knew, neither
had my wife. As for Keren, who was constantly on my mind then, she didn’t have anyone to even consider
a potential mate—and it was even possible she’d pass into the next world without a single marriage
or child. What was the point, I kept thinking, of being unfair to each other when life was so unfair to all of us anyway?
Everyone, I thought, was constantly in danger of not having enough time to experience the things people as- sume are so basic—like partnership and children—and here these literary men argue over irony and all kinds of other concepts that don’t even matter. It’s enough, I thought, to make you crazy.
A few weeks went by this way without my really notic- ing. I was deep into my reading and it was around then that I saw Kierkegaard had written another book, a followup to his thesis, called The Concept of Anxiety,
in which he railed against Hegel’s notion of media- tion. Barthelme, it occurred to me, could have writ- ten another story, “Kierkegaard Unfair to Hegel,” in which he could have explored how anxiety affected
his character’s life no less than irony—the romantic anxiety I was sure he experience. But he hadn’t writ- ten such a story. As I looked into his life, I learned that he’d moved back to Houston, where he’d grown up and studied, and became a professor of creative writ- ing. He wrote many more stories and novels but none of them about anxiety. His most significance reference to anxiety, in fact, came in his novel Snow White, which I had myself first read in college, when the narrator states about one of the characters that he “does not believe in anxiety.”
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