Donald Barthelme
Page 30
Q: That’s a very common fantasy.
A: All my fantasies are extremely ordinary.
Q: Does it give you pleasure?
A: A poor . . . A rather unsatisfactory . . .
Q: What is the frequency?
A: Oh God who knows. Once in a while. Sometimes.
Q: You’re not cooperating.
A: I’m not interested.
Q: I might do an article.
A: I don’t like to have my picture taken.
Q: Solipsism plus triumphantism.
A: It’s possible.
Q: You’re not political?
A: I’m extremely political in a way that does no good to anybody.
Q: You don’t participate?
A: I participate. I make demands, sign newspaper advertisements, vote. I make small campaign contributions to the candidate of my choice and turn my irony against the others. But I accomplish nothing. I march, it’s ludicrous. In the last march, there were eighty-seven thousand people marching, by the most conservative estimate, and yet being in the midst of them, marching with them . . . I wanted to march with the Stationary Engineers, march under their banner, but two cops prevented me, they said I couldn’t enter at that point, I had to go back to the beginning. So I went back to the beginning and marched with the Food Handlers for Peace and Freedom.
Q: What sort of people were they?
A: They looked just like everybody else. It’s possible they weren’t real food handlers. Maybe just the two holding the sign. I don’t know. There were a lot of girls in black pajamas and peasant straw hats, very young girls, high-school girls, running, holding hands in a long chain, laughing. . . .
Q: You’ve been pretty hard on our machines. You’ve withheld your enthusiasm, that’s damaging . . .
A: I’m sorry.
Q: Do you think your irony could be helpful in changing the government?
A: I think the government is very often in an ironic relation to itself. And that’s helpful. For example: we’re spending a great deal of money for this army we have, a very large army, beautifully equipped. We’re spending something on the order of twenty billions a year for it. Now, the whole point of an army is—what’s the word?—deterrence. And the nut of deterrence is credibility. So what does the government do? It goes and sells off its surplus uniforms. And the kids start wearing them, uniforms or parts of uniforms, because they’re cheap and have some sort of style. And immediately you get this vast clown army in the streets parodying the real army. And they mix periods, you know, you get parody British grenadiers and parody World War I types and parody Sierra Maestra types. So you have all these kids walking around wearing these filthy uniforms with wound stripes, hash marks, Silver Stars, but also ostrich feathers, Day-Glo vests, amulets containing powdered rhinoceros horn . . . You have this splendid clown army in the streets standing over against the real one. And of course the clown army constitutes a very serious attack on all the ideas which support the real army including the basic notion of having an army at all. The government has opened itself to all this, this undermining of its own credibility, just because it wants to make a few dollars peddling old uniforms. . . .
Q: How is my car?
Q: How is my nail?
Q: How is the taste of my potato?
Q: How is the cook of my potato?
Q: How is my garb?
Q: How is my button?
Q: How is the flower bath?
Q: How is the shame?
Q: How is the plan?
Q: How is the fire?
Q: How is the flue?
Q: How is my mad mother?
Q: How is the aphorism I left with you?
Q: You are an ironist.
A: It’s useful.
Q: How is it useful?
A: Well, let me tell you a story. Several years ago I was living in a rented house in Colorado. The house was what is called a rancher—three or four bedrooms, knotty pine or some such on the inside, cedar shakes or something like that on the outside. It was owned by a ski instructor who lived there with his family in the winter. It had what seemed to be hundreds of closets and we immediately discovered that these closets were filled to overflowing with all kinds of play equipment. Never in my life had I seen so much play equipment gathered together in one place outside, say, Abercrombie’s. There were bows and arrows and shuffleboard and croquet sets, putting greens and trampolines and things that you strapped to your feet and jumped up and down on, table tennis and jai alai and poker chips and home roulette wheels, chess and checkers and Chinese checkers and balls of all kinds, hoops and nets and wickets, badminton and books and a thousand board games, and a dingus with cymbals on top that you banged on the floor to keep time to the piano. The merest drawer in a bedside table was choked with marked cards and Monopoly money.
Now, suppose I had been of an ironical turn of mind and wanted to make a joke about all this, some sort of joke that would convey that I had noticed the striking degree of boredom implied by the presence of all this impedimenta and one which would also serve to comment upon the particular way of struggling with boredom that these people had chosen. I might have said, for instance, that the remedy is worse than the disease. Or quoted Nietzsche to the effect that the thought of suicide is a great consolation and had helped him through many a bad night. Either of these perfectly good jokes would do to annihilate the situation of being uncomfortable in this house. The shuffleboard sticks, the barbells, balls of all kinds—my joke has, in effect, thrown them out of the world. An amazing magical power!
Now, suppose that I am suddenly curious about this amazing magical power. Suppose I become curious about how my irony actually works—how it functions. I pick up a copy of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony (the ski instructor is also a student of Kierkegaard) and I am immediately plunged into difficulties. The situation bristles with difficulties. To begin with, Kierkegaard says that the outstanding feature of irony is that it confers upon the ironist a subjective freedom. The subject, the speaker, is negatively free. If what the ironist says is not his meaning, or is the opposite of his meaning, he is free both in relation to others and in relation to himself. He is not bound by what he has said. Irony is a means of depriving the object of its reality in order that the subject may feel free.
Irony deprives the object of its reality when the ironist says something about the object that is not what he means. Kierkegaard distinguishes between the phenomenon (the word) and the essence (the thought or meaning). Truth demands an identity of essence and phenomenon. But with irony quote the phenomenon is not the essence but the opposite of the essence unquote page 264. The object is deprived of its reality by what I have said about it. Regarded in an ironical light, the object shivers, shatters, disappears. Irony is thus destructive and what Kierkegaard worries about a lot is that irony has nothing to put in the place of what it has destroyed. The new actuality—what the ironist has said about the object—is peculiar in that it is a comment upon a former actuality rather than a new actuality. This account of Kierkegaard’s account of irony is grossly oversimplified. Now, consider an irony directed not against a given object but against the whole of existence. An irony directed against the whole of existence produces, according to Kierkegaard, estrangement and poetry. The ironist, serially successful in disposing of various objects of his irony, becomes drunk with freedom. He becomes, in Kierkegaard’s words, lighter and lighter. Irony becomes an infinite absolute negativity. Quote irony no longer directs itself against this or that particular phenomenon, against a particular thing unquote. Quote the whole of existence has become alien to the ironic subject unquote page 276. For Kierkegaard, the actuality of irony is poetry. This may be clarified by reference to Kierkegaard’s treatment of Schlegel.
Schlegel had written a book, a novel, called Lucinde. Kierkegaard is very hard on Schlegel and Lucinde. Kierkegaard characte
rizes this novel of Schlegel’s as quote poetical unquote page 308. By which he means to suggest that Schlegel has constructed an actuality which is superior to the historical actuality and a substitute for it. By negating the historical actuality poetry quote opens up a higher actuality, expands and transfigures the imperfect into the perfect, and thereby softens and mitigates that deep pain which would darken and obscure all things unquote page 312. That’s beautiful. Now this would seem to be a victory for Schlegel, and indeed Kierkegaard says that poetry is a victory over the world. But it is not the case that Lucinde is a victory for Schlegel. What is wanted, Kierkegaard says, is not a victory over the world but a reconciliation with the world. And it is soon discovered that although poetry is a kind of reconciliation, the distance between the new actuality, higher and more perfect than the historical actuality, and the historical actuality, lower and more imperfect than the new actuality, produces not a reconciliation but animosity. Quote so that it often becomes no reconciliation at all but rather animosity unquote same page. What began as a victory eventuates in animosity. The true task is reconciliation with actuality and the true reconciliation, Kierkegaard says, is religion. Without discussing whether or not the true reconciliation is religion (I have a deep bias against religion which precludes my discussing the question intelligently) let me say that I believe that Kierkegaard is here unfair to Schlegel. I find it hard to persuade myself that the relation of Schlegel’s novel to actuality is what Kierkegaard says it is. I have reasons for this (I believe, for example, that Kierkegaard fastens upon Schlegel’s novel in its prescriptive aspect—in which it presents itself as a text telling us how to live—and neglects other aspects, its objecthood for one) but my reasons are not so interesting. What is interesting is my making the statement that I think Kierkegaard is unfair to Schlegel. And that the whole thing is nothing else but a damned shame and crime!
Because that is not what I think at all. We have to do here with my own irony. Because of course Kierkegaard was “fair” to Schlegel. In making a statement to the contrary I am attempting to . . . I might have several purposes—simply being provocative, for example. But mostly I am trying to annihilate Kierkegaard in order to deal with his disapproval.
Q: Of Schlegel?
A: Of me.
Q: What is she doing now?
A: She appears to be—
Q: How does she look?
A: Self-absorbed.
Q: That’s not enough. You can’t just say, “Self-absorbed.” You have to give more . . . You’ve made a sort of promise which . . .
A:
Q: Are her eyes closed?
A: Her eyes are open. She’s staring.
Q: What is she staring at?
A: Nothing that I can see.
Q: And?
A: She’s caressing her breasts.
Q: Still wearing the blouse?
A: Yes.
Q: A yellow blouse?
A: Blue.
A: Sunday. We took the baby to Central Park. At the Children’s Zoo she wanted to ride a baby Shetland pony which appeared to be about ten minutes old. Howled when told she could not. Then into a meadow (not a real meadow but an excuse for a meadow) for ball-throwing. I slept last night on the couch rather than in the bed. The couch is harder and when I can’t sleep I need a harder surface. Dreamed that my father told me that my work was garbage. Mr. Garbage, he called me in the dream. Then, at dawn, the baby woke me again. She had taken off her nightclothes and climbed into a pillowcase. She was standing by the couch in the pillowcase, as if at the starting line of a sack race. When we got back from the park I finished reading the Hitchcock-Truffaut book. In the Hitchcock-Truffaut book there is a passage in which Truffaut comments on Psycho. “If I’m not mistaken, out of your fifty works, this is the only film showing . . .” Janet Leigh in a bra. And Hitchcock says: “But the scene would have been more interesting if the girl’s bare breasts had been rubbing against the man’s chest.” That’s true. H. and S. came for supper. Veal Scaloppine Marsala and very well done, with green noodles and salad. Buckets of vodka before and buckets of brandy after. The brandy depressed me. Some talk about the new artists’ tenement being made out of an old warehouse building. H. said, “I hear it’s going to be very classy. I hear it’s going to have white rats.” H. spoke about his former wife and toothbrushes: “She was always at it, fiercely, many hours a day and night.” I don’t know if this stuff is useful . . .
Q: I’m not your doctor.
A: Pity.
A: But I love my irony.
Q: Does it give you pleasure?
A: A poor . . . A rather unsatisfactory. . . .
Q: The unavoidable tendency of everything particular to emphasize its own particularity.
A: Yes.
Q: You could interest yourself in these interesting machines. They’re hard to understand. They’re time-consuming.
A: I don’t like you.
Q: I sensed it.
A: These imbecile questions . . .
Q: Inadequately answered. . . .
A: . . . imbecile questions leading nowhere . . .
Q: The personal abuse continues.
A: . . . that voice, confident and shrill . . .
Q (aside): He has given away his gaiety, and now has nothing.
Q: But consider the moment when Pasteur, distracted, ashamed, calls upon Mme. Boucicault, widow of the department-store owner. Pasteur stammers, sweats; it is clear that he is there to ask for money, money for his Institute. He becomes more firm, masters himself, speaks with force, yet he is not sure that she knows who he is, that he is Pasteur. “The least contribution,” he says finally. “But of course,” she (equally embarrassed) replies. She writes a check. He looks at the check. One million francs. They both burst into tears.
A (bitterly): Yes, that makes up for everything, that you know that story. . . .
The Phantom of the Opera’s Friend
I HAVE never visited him in his sumptuous quarters five levels below the Opera, across the dark lake.
But he has described them. Rich divans, exquisitely carved tables, amazing silk and satin draperies. The large, superbly embellished mantelpiece, on which rest two curious boxes, one containing the figure of a grasshopper, the other the figure of a scorpion . . .
He can, in discoursing upon his domestic arrangements, become almost merry. For example, speaking of the wine he has stolen from the private cellar of the Opera’s Board of Directors:
“A very adequate Montrachet! Four bottles! Each director accusing every other director! I tell you, it made me feel like a director myself! As if I were worth two or three millions and had a fat, ugly wife! And the trout was admirable. You know what the Poles say—fish, to taste right, must swim three times: in water, butter, and wine. All in all, a splendid evening!”
But he immediately alters the mood by making some gloomy observation. “Our behavior is mocked by the behavior of dogs.”
It is not often that the accents of joy issue from beneath that mask.
Monday. I am standing at the place I sometimes encounter him, a little door at the rear of the Opera (the building has 2,531 doors to which there are 7,593 keys). He always appears “suddenly”—a coup de théâtre that is, to tell the truth, more annoying than anything else. We enact a little comedy of surprise.
“It’s you!”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Waiting.”
But today no one appears, although I wait for half an hour. I have wasted my time. Except—
Faintly, through many layers of stone, I hear organ music. The music is attenuated but unmistakable. It is his great work Don Juan Triumphant. A communication of a kind.
I rejoice in his immense, buried talent.
But I know that he is not happy.
His situation is simple and t
errible. He must decide whether to risk life aboveground or to remain forever in hiding, in the cellars of the Opera.
His tentative, testing explorations in the city (always at night) have not persuaded him to one course or the other. Too, the city is no longer the city he knew as a young man. Its meaning has changed.
At a cafe table, in a place where the light from the streetlamps is broken by a large tree, we sit silently over our drinks.
Everything that can be said has been said many times.
I have no new observations to make. The decision he faces has been tormenting him for decades.
“If after all I—”
But he cannot finish the sentence. We both know what is meant.
I am distracted, a bit angry. How many nights have I spent this way, waiting upon his sighs?
In the early years of our friendship I proposed vigorous measures. A new life! Advances in surgery, I told him, had made a normal existence possible for him. New techniques in—
“I’m too old.”
One is never too old, I said. There were still many satisfactions open to him, not the least the possibility of service to others. His music! A home, even marriage and children were not out of the question. What was required was boldness, the will to break out of old patterns . . .
Now as these thoughts flicker through our brains, he smiles ironically.
Sometimes he speaks of Christine:
“That voice!
“But I was perhaps overdazzled by the circumstances . . .
“A range from low C to the F above high C!
“Flawed, of course . . .
“Liszt heard her. ‘Que, c’est beau!’ he cried out.
“Possibly somewhat deficient in temperament. But I had temperament enough for two.
“Such goodness! Such gentleness!
“I would pull down the very doors of heaven for a—”