LEONARD KRIEGEL
583
came, I saw, I conquered!" can so easily be transformed into, "I suffered, I
overcame, I endured!" It is not, finally, the life one seeks to redeem - it is
the disease. For it is the disease that challenges the self to be "better" than
what it was.
Hans Castorp discovers that he must affirm the power of the idea that
disease has snatched him from the jaws of health if he is to be made con–
scious. In seeking shelter in Kafka's House, he deserts the humdrum and
banal for the possibility of the erotic and exciting. Made physically smaller,
the self suddenly looms larger. To be doomed by illness is to learn how to
refuse the temptation of the ordinary and settled. Were I given to looking for
signs, I would point out that as each of them came to the end of his life,
Kafka and Hemingway switched roles - the one insisting on the need to
"overcome" disease and accept the healthy, the other sticking a shotgun
in
his
mouth to blow his "healthy" head away.
ANATOLE BROYARD
1920 - 1990
