The Lute and the Scars

PREFACE FOR DANILO KIŠ

There are various ways of imagining a new era of world literature. My favorite is to remember the story of Danilo Kiš.

His outside story is the devastated history of Central Europe. He was born in 1935. In 1944, his father, who was Jewish, was taken to Auschwitz, and did not return. In 1947, Kiš was repatriated with his mother to Montenegro, where he studied art, then the violin, and finally entered the University of Belgrade in the Department of Comparative Literature. He would go on to teach Serbo-Croat to students in various French universities, and he eventually settled in Paris — an emigrant in the self-imposed style of James Joyce. He died in Paris in 1989, when he was only fifty-four. But the inside story, the story of his art, is even more unique.

Can I put it in a highspeed sentence? His style was encyclopedia entries, definitions in historical dictionaries, legends told in footnotes, postscripts incorporating unsubstantiated rumor. His fictions very rarely looked like fictions. Instead, they adopted the look of annals or chronicles or pulp fictions. Because this, after all, is what happens to a life: if it’s remembered at all, it’s remembered in words. And this is the essence of the style called Danilo Kiš: it is always an experiment with foreshortening.

And if his chronicler wanted to recount an exhaustive prehis-tory of this style, then traces could be found, sure enough, in Isaac Babel, and Dostoyevsky, as well as in Edgar Allan Poe. But the real precursor was Jorge Luis Borges. In Buenos Aires, in his fictions written in the first half of the twentieth century, Borges invented a way of writing stories by not, in fact, writing them at all. Instead, he described them in antiquarian summaries, as if these fictions were already written, already part of a minute literary history: in fake entries from catalogues or encyclopedias. In his essays and his interviews, Kiš kept offering up new definitions of Borges’s radical invention. It was, he said once, a

new way of using “documents.” It enabled him to compress his material to the maximum, which is, after all, the ideal of narrative art. I repeat: the document is the surest way to make a story seem both convincing and true, and what is literature for if not to convince us of the truth of what it tells, of the writer’s literary fantasies. Such is the direction Borges’s investigations take, and they lead him to the pinnacle of narrative art and technique.^*

Or sometimes he put it like this, in the language of logic: “The story. which emphasized detail and created its mythologemic field by means of induction, underwent a magic, revolutionary transformation in Borges: Borges introduced deduction. ” For this kink introduced by Borges into the normal order of a story was a liberation machine, an ejector seat. It allowed Kiš to ignore so many of the old-fashioned problems, like character and psychology — all the otiose mechanics of verismo. I mean: you could make a Kiš anthology of irritation at the previous deadend methods:

Example 1

“What I can’t stand is the serialized or feuilleton-type fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its hidden omniscient author. ”

Example 2

“. the omniscience of the narrator and the art of psychological portraiture, those most pernicious and persistent of literary conventions.”

But the history of world literature isn’t a history of repeats. The Borges system was a gorgeous thing, but Kiš invented his own kink in that tradition too. For Borges’s stories are inventions from the innocent half of the twentieth century. Whereas Kiš came in the aftermath. The entropic centre of his electric fictions is the century’s twin death camps: the camps of the Nazi régime, and the camps of the Soviet régime. All history is crime, in Kiš’s fiction. (No wonder he wrote a great, sympathetic essay on the fictions of the Marquis de Sade.) Borges had called one of his books A Universal History of Infamy, but his idea of infamy was so much more minor than anything Kiš knew: it was barrio gangsters and pistolets. So that where Borges’s stories were really always investigations of metaphysics, wrote Kiš, he himself investigated the violent networks of commissars and kommandants. He used the document method to investigate history: “man’s soul having long since been given up to the Devil.”

His impatience with the usual psychological novel, in other words, was part of a deeper investigation. “Confronting imaginary characters with psychology is to my mind anachronistic. ” Well, sure! It had been taken over by what Kiš called schizopsychology—the mass and murderous neuroses.

Hiroshima is the focal point of that fantastic world, whose contours could first be discerned at about the time of the First World War, when the horror of secret societies began to come to life in the form of mass ritual sacrifices on the altar of ideology, the golden calf, religion. I say “secret societies” because I am speaking of the occult.

History is a history of violence. It always ends up as a garbage heap. And so, in response, literature has to itemise and restore the garbage. This was Kiš’s wisdom. He once imagined a story that would be a description of a trash can (just as Calvino — another student of the Borges system — would try in his own late essay on garbage.) “I believe that literature must correct History,” wrote Kiš. Its job, in other words, was the restoration of corrupted texts.

In Kiš’s early fiction (Garden, Ashes, or Early Sorrows) he invented his first method of restoration — a kind of luminous autobiography, in the magical imploded first-person voice of a child. This voice is only foreground, an encrusted surface of detail that won’t give — but it gives everywhere — onto the catastrophic history underneath. It is total indirection.

And this indirection is one of Kiš’s most savage innovations. You don’t know what showing means, I think, until you’ve read his stories. This kind of indirection might have been the professed nineteenth-century ideal, a prim dislike of telling, but Kiš’s indirection is more wayout and final than, say, the grand fictions of Henry James. It was the only way he could find to encompass his vast material. For “to name is to diminish.” Only by concealing a theme can you approach its total description. And so the reader is slowed into stillness by the density of detail in his prose — always about to transform itself into a list. I mean: you could make another anthology out of Kiš’s love of the list:

Example 1

“This non-alphabetic enumeration, the onomasticon, is the system perhaps best suited to reflect the chaotic crisscross of the prose of the world, the magma that verbal mechanics merely seems to set in order. ”

Example 2

“Reading the Bible, Homer, or Rabelais, I keep finding devices engendered by the disparity and incongruity of objects in chance encounter.”

Which is another way of saying that the detail in Kiš is part of his new deductive method, it’s based on his deep principle of collage — not the dead inductive methods of previous fiction. And this is why, in the ’70s, when Borges was translated into SerboCroat for the first time, it was possible for Kiš to develop a new technique out of the old one. And so, in his great books from the 1970s, Hourglass and A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, he moved from the first person to the third person. In Hourglass, this created the intricacy of its form: where alternating manuscripts are finally endstopped by a single document: a letter dated April 5, 1942. In A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, this created the delicate juxtapositions of his stories about the Stalinist machine: their principle of thematic germination. His technique of the legend became complicated by the technique of the document.

Kiš’s unit was always very small. It was a manuscript, or legend: a brief life. Then he’d organise these brief lives into collage compositions — novels, or story cycles, or cycles of novels. By the last decade of his life, his stories were adding up to a scattered conspectus of the world’s crimes. The last book he published, The Encyclopedia of the Dead, came out in 1983. In a postscript, he described its theme: “All the stories in this book, to a greater or lesser extent, come under the sign of a theme I would call metaphysical: ever since the Gilgamesh epic, death has been one of the obsessive themes of literature.”

But there was an entire studio of other stories — which approached this theme more secretly, more tangentially. These stories, collected as The Lute and the Scars, are the final products of his factory for restoring lost lives. And in their delicate state, they therefore offer the most vulnerable version of Kiš’s art. The reader of this archive encounters all of Kiš’s acrobatics — his fake documents, true stories, the fantastical everyday: all his methods to keep trying to restore the dead to life. In “The Debt,” a life story emerges from a dying man’s hallucinated list of debts:

To Mr. Dinko Lukšić from Sutivan, whose hospitality made my days more pleasant and improved my health so that I could complete my volume of poetry: two crowns.

To the young investigating magistrate, a Viennese, who, on the occasion of my arrest in Split, allowed me to send for my personal effects, which had remained behind in my pension; he brought me Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, and that book would end up having a decisive impact on my intellect: two crowns.

In “The Stateless One,” it emerges through a prophecy; in “The Marathon Runner and the Race Official,” through a dream; in “The Poet,” through a legend. These stories, in other words, are a primer in the method of Danilo Kiš. They will make the reader Kišified. And so eventually this newly Kišified reader will note even smaller acts of restoration: like the smuggled list in the postscript to the story called “Jurij Golec,” where in the guise of describing a collection of furs, in order to just wearily prove an authorial point of verismo, his story becomes an arctic forest: “mink, silver fox, arctic fox, lynx, Canadian wolf, astrakhan, beaver, nutria, marmot, muskrat, coyote. ” Even a postscript is another way for Kiš to create truths, not fictions. Because, as he writes, in another list, created by the list of animals, these furs have now “found their way into the story through the back door, after the fact, unleashing new sensations, opening new worlds: métiers, market forces, money, adventure, hunting, weapons, knives, traps, blood, animal anatomy, zoology, far-off exotic regions, nocturnal animal noises, Lafontaine’s fables. ” Yes, writes Kiš, with careful irony, at the end of the end of this short story: “great are the temptations of a tale. In contrast to a novel, however, one may not, in a tale, open the doors of cabinets with impunity.”

So maybe I can put it like this. These exposed last stories from his studio prove that metafictional problems are in fact the ethical problems of history. They are different aspects of a single question: how do you restore the murdered to life? This is the deep question of Kiš’s fiction, and it’s one reason why his fiction represents an ongoing and future laboratory. His stories offer innovative, zigzagging ways of convincing a reader that a story is true. Why should there be a single method? He himself, as he recorded in an interview in 1976, with blunt technical clarity, had originally relied on the magical methods of the first person:

What I mean is that spells, incantations, charges (in Valéry’s sense) were the only literary means I had to win over my readers, convince them that the words they were reading were not mere idle fantasies but a form of truth and experience.

But then there was a shift.

In Hourglass, where I switch to the third person and therefore lose the confessional tone, I was forced to use other devices (objective images, invented footnotes, “documents”) so as to make readers believe, again, that they were reading more than fantasies or figments of the imagination, that they were reading the truth, and not only artistic truth.

And he added: “Call it commitment if you like: an enlargement of the circle of reality as well as an increase in the obligations resulting from it. ”

Yes, there are various ways of imagining a future world literature. And one of the most precious and wildest examples is the method of Danilo Kiš: this attempt to write minute encyclopaedias.

“I believe,” he wrote, “that in its ideal, unattainable, Platonic form the novel should resemble an encyclopedia entry or, rather, a series of entries branching out in all directions yet condensed.” A novel, in other words, should organise the maximum content in the minimum space. And it makes me think of the strangest text in The Lute and the Scars: just called “A and B.” It’s only a description of Kiš’s most magical place, followed by a description of his worst. The worst place — Text B — is a village hut, described in his manner of deep detail:

The walls have been whitewashed with an ochre-colored preparation made by dissolving clay in lukewarm water. The effects of dampness and sunshine are such that this coating blisters or develops cracks that look like scales or the faded canvases of Old Masters. The floor is also of pounded clay that lies several centimeters lower than the surface of the yard. On humid days the clay smells of urine. (A shed for animals once stood here.)

Whereas his magical place — Text A — is a place of total openness: a view of the sea from the mountains.

And you have to know for certain that your father traveled this same stretch of road, either on a bus or in a taxi he had hired in Kotor, and you have to be convinced that he beheld this same sight: the sun popping into view in the west from behind clouds that looked like a herd of white elephants; the high mountains dissolving in mist; the inky dark blue of the water in the bay; the city at the foot of the mountains.

But then this story or memoir or fragment ends with a postscript in a single sentence: “Texts A and B are connected to each other by mysterious bonds.”

And with that sketched sentence, I think, Kiš transforms his twin fragments into the smallest novel possible: a universal history of loss — described without psychology, or character, in a couple of pages.

There are various way of imagining a future world literature. And one of them, I just mean, is to realise that Danilo Kiš is there already.

ADAM THIRLWELL, 2012

* Save where indicated by the text, this and other quotes in the Preface are from Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews. ed. Susan Sontag, (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1995).