Do you know what I often expect to find after reading a graphic depiction of domestic violence? Uxoricidal comedy. Because living women can be such a burden, but dead wives, on the other hand… They’re simply a hoot.
Last week’s New Yorker featured a story about the innovative techniques currently used to fight domestic violence—with detailed descriptions of a woman who was stalked, raped, brutally beaten, and ultimately shot to death in front of her child. And then the very same issue also included this charming anecdote in James Wood’s featured critical essay “Sins of the Father”:
Almost twenty years ago, George Steiner suggested in these pages that doing philosophy was incompatible with domestic life. Speaking of the troubled French thinker Louis Althusser, Steiner proposed that sometimes it might be necessary for a philosopher to strangle his wife.
Are you laughing yet? Because Althusser did, in fact, strangle his wife. Wood has quite a gift with that sardonic humor, doesn’t he?