John Gunther’s memoir Death Be Not Proud (1949), the account of his teenage son’s illness and death from a brain tumor, was one of the small number of actual books assigned by my high school, long long ago, but not so long that a memoir from 1949 did not seem just a bit antique. Not that I remember it well. It was earnest, instructive, sad.
Frigyes Karinthy’s brain tumor memoir A Journey Round My
Skull (1937) is a different kind of critter. Karinthy, in his late forties when he becomes
ill, was a comic writer, famous enough in Hungary that his operation was
covered in Budapest newspapers. He has a
sense of humor about his illness, a great help in writing a book about it, and
presumably in living through it. And he
writes the book himself, so it has a happy ending, for a while, at least.
A true Austro-Hungarian, however the borders have changed,
Karinthy spends the first three pages sitting in a café, goofing off, doing the
crossword.
And at that very moment the trains started… Three times I raised my head, and it was only when the fourth train stated that I realized I was suffering from an hallucination. (“The Invisible Train,” 12-13, tr. Vernon Duckworth Barker)
The interesting thing, from a literary and philosophical
perspective, about a brain disease is the change in sensory perception. We have enough trouble understanding what is
around us when our senses work the way we are used to, much less when the brain
starts playing tricks. The subjective /
objective split becomes intense.
The climax of the book is Karinthy’s operation, when he is
under (only!) local anesthetic, adding another layer of weirdness, and
recovery. Time shifts and is compressed,
recurring dreams replace reality, particularly the one described in the titles
of Chapter 24, “Half a Dog Running to Telleborg,” in which Karinthy is sure he
is half of a dog that has been cut in half by one of the invisible trains first
heard in Chapter 1.
This part of the book gets pretty weird.
The following pages came before my eyes like a sequence from a film. Try as I may, I cannot say for certain whether I has this experience during the operation itself or during my feverish dreams of the next few days. My excursion in Time (which I shall describe shortly) may have begun at that moment, and is perhaps causing me to place in this chapter a series of pictures which should belong to the next… In that film, the following sequence appears next, and it is therefore here that I shall include it. (241)
It is a little apologia for Modernist fiction. It is the older writers who were wrong, just
putting one event after another.
The disease memoir is a well-formed genre now, and the film
that most of A Journey Round My Skull resembles, not the weirdness of
the operation but the earlier part, the series of symptoms, doctors, and diagnoses,
is the last third of Nanni Moretti’s Caro Diario (1993), the brilliant “Doctors”
sequence, in which Moretti bravely recreates his own maddening journey through
the Italian medical system.
In the middle of the operation, Karinthy interrupts himself
with chapter titled “Addis Ababa.” He
checks in on people back in Budapest, his son (“who was now free to do as he
liked, was probably enjoying himself,” 227), his friends, strangers reading
about him in the newspaper:
At the morgue in the Szvetenay-ucca the corpses were lying peacefully in their zinc cases. The only sound came from the dripping of ice as it melted under them. Some of them wore an expression of indifference, and some one of surprise. ON every face, there was an expression of some kind that had no meaning, as it had no cause. An attendant had sat down on the doorstep to eat a hunch of bacon. His companion was reading to him from a newspaper. When he came to the title of my operation report the attendant cut himself another slice of bacon.
“Who is he, anyhow?” he asked, in a bored tone. (236-7)
Meanwhile, the Italians conquer Ethiopia. Disease memoirs are a form of wisdom
literature.
