488
NEIL SCHMITZ
ment to the contrary I am attempting to .
I might
have
several pur–
poses - 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." The respondent then recites episodes from
his daily life, an existence as bleak as the game-filled room, and only
then does the Pasteur anecdote arrive as a stabbing period. Although
the questioner falls silent when the writer loses himself in this elegaic
fable of a lost, value-centered epoch, he remains an active and disruptive
voice
in
City Life,
the lucid linguistic intelligence that in "Brain Dam–
age" reveals the
folie
in Barthelme's ironic language. For if the writer
here confesses his own madness,
his
brain damage, it is his language
itself that collapses in the piece. "Brain Damage" is a series of artistic
flourishes broken by a refrain: "WHAT RECOURSE?" In each refrain
the day-room activities of the insane (writhing, howling, retching, faint–
ing, rhythmic handclapping, shouting, food consumption) are severally
given in boldface, severe breaks in the text that disclose one specific
absolute reached by the course of irony.
Yet in "The Sentence" the sentence goes on, asking the questions
asked in "Brain Damage," those cruel Kicrkegaardian questions: to what
end, in whose name, what recourse? The ironist, Kierkegaard declares,
"is conscious of the negativity of the infinite in existence, and he con–
stantly keeps the wound of the negative open, which in the bodily realm
is sometimes the condition for a cure. The others let the wound heal
over and become positive; that is to say, they are deceived." Even
Schlegel himself, discussing the "irony of irony" in 1789, recognized
that only the "gods" could release one from the unending duplicity of
ironic language, that in brief, as De Man convincingly argues, there is
no deliverance in irony. Either one takes the Kierkegaardian leap of
faith, a leap from ironic language, or one lapses into the autistic silence
of Melville's Bartleby who moves inexorably from the refusal to write
to the refusal to speak to the refusal of life. There is, needless to say,
a Bartlebian figure in
Snow White,
the far-seeing dwarf, Bill, whose
gradual self-surrender leads to his execution.
In
Sadness,
as I have suggested, Barthelme reconsiders the abyss
opened in
City Life.
Although certain fictions recall the Kafkaesque
mode employed in earlier volumes, specifically "A City of Churches"
and "Subpoena," it is the opened wound of the negative, ironic self–
consciousness, that engenders the book's controlling mood. "While I read
the
Journal of Sensory Deprivation,"
the lead story, "Critique de la vie
quotidienne," begins, "Wanda, my former wife, read
Elle."
That note
