Thursday, July 08, 2010

Leo a Donald Barthelme

De "Daumier", del apartado Two whiskeys with a friend, transcribo:

"I myself," said Gibbon, "am slightly underdone in the personal worthlessness line. It was Papa's fault. He used no irony. The communications mix offered by the parent to the child is as you know twelve percent huggles and endearments. That is standard. Now, to avoid boring himself or herself to death during this monition the parent enlivens the discourse with wit, usually irony of the cheaper sort. The irony ambigufies the message, but more importantly establishes in the child the sense of personal lack-of-worth".

Creo que es suficiente, de este texto. Iba a transcribir más pero recordé esto otro, de "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel", donde la ironía se enlaza también con el aburrimiento:

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 on the bedside table was choked with maked 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 [...]".

El texto sigue, claro, pero, también, creo que hasta aquí es suficiente. Lo recomiendo mucho, sin embargo. Aún sigo pensando en la razón que revela el ironista de este texto para atacar el sentido de la ironía de Kierkegaard y la preocupación de Kierkegaard por el modo en que la ironía destruye sin construir (por decirlo de algun modo); y el sentido de su ataque, es, sencillamente (y es más sencillo que, digamos, provocar), poder lidiar con la desaprobación de Kierkegaard.

Es muy agradable encontrar textos literarios que plantean preguntas sobre la ironía sin atacarla directamente. Exponiendo, nada más. Ni eso, digamos. Lo mismo sentí leyendo algunos pasajes de La montaña mágica.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

gracias a Dios por intiresny