‘A theme I would call metaphysical’
Danilo Kiš, The Encyclopedia of the Dead
Penguin Classics, 192pp, £9.99, ISBN 9780141396989
reviewed by Matt Lewis
Danilo Kiš was not your traditional purveyor of short fiction. As Mark Thompson’s excellent introduction to this new Penguin Classics edition points out, the Yugoslav saw himself as the man to rescue the short story from its ‘state of permanent stagnation.’ After the horrors of the 20th century’s disasters and wars, many of which he bore witness to, ‘the idea that “the totality of the world and of experience” could be revealed in a “slice of life”’ was laughable. For that reason, he veered away from the conventional, Chekhovian model and sought to create what he referred to as ‘short novels’: fictions that were self-contained worlds, but where ‘nothing is supremely meaningful and nothing is meaningless.’ Kiš embraced the Joycean mission to encompass everything in his writing. His fictions are information-filled vaults that permit multiple visits, with new treasure to be had each time. As the author once told an interviewer: ‘my ideal has always been a work that, after the first time round, can be read as an encyclopedia’ – whence the encyclopaedia of the title (and the collection’s third tale).
Short stories are often a hard sell in the UK. They don’t form part of the national literary culture – in the way that they do in the US, for instance – and British readers are often loath to part with a tenner for less than 200 pages. The sales figures show that Anglo-Saxon readers tend to shy away from translated fiction, too. With this in mind, Penguin’s decision to republish a 167-page collection, first translated from the Serbo-Croat in 1989, might well seem either anti-commercial or downright reckless. But when we're speaking of a talent like Kiš's, complaints about profit margins might well be as churlish, or as misplaced, as lamentations about the passing of the orthodox short story format. The tales that make up the collection are varied in tone and subject matter but are loosely united, as the author admits in his postscript, ‘under the sign of a theme I would call metaphysical.’ Death, he notes, ‘has been one of the obsessive themes of literature.’ And the 20th century’s theatre of butchery, which claimed Kiš's own Jewish father as well as many of his relatives, offered no shortage of death and destruction, and hence of inspiration for these stories.
The first story in the book, ‘Simon Magus’, is a variation of a tale related in the New Testament Apocrypha about the biblical figure of Simon the Sorcerer. In it, Simon challenges Peter and the disciples about their beliefs, before levitating and finally meeting a tragic end. Another story retells the eastern legend of the Seven Sleepers, a key Christian and Muslim parable where early believers of a religion flee to the mountains to escape persecution before being trapped in a cave by the authorities. There they sleep for almost two centuries, before being awakened and shocked by the changed reality. Other tales take place at various different historical moments in the 20th century, in a selection of cities dotted across Europe. But whilst the settings and timings are varied, the language remains the same. It is stately and precise, its rhythms refreshingly different to those of both the slangy postmodernist and the serious modernist, with his interminable concatenations. There is something timeless about the prose's austerity. It is like the language of the Encyclopedia of the Dead itself — not this book, but the one that appears in the story of the same name, and is described there as ‘an unlikely amalgam of encyclopedic conciseness and biblical eloquence.’
One of the few points at which one might reasonably guess at the content's origins in the second half of the 20th century is the metafictional opening to ‘The Mirror of the Unknown’, which starts: ‘This story does not begin abruptly, in media res, but gradually, as when night falls in the woods.’ The passage continues with a sequence of rib-nudging asides in parentheses: ‘(thinks the girl, more or less) … (… they are poisonous mushrooms … which she does not, should not know.)’ However, these highbrow tactics are more of a gentle gesture towards the metafictional than the bourgeois-baiting transgressive pokes associated with Kiš’s North American counterpart: more Tristram Shandy than Lost in the Funhouse. This self-reflexive impulse of Kiš is simply part of a greater reflection on the acts of reading and writing – the act of literariness, we might say – and the text is speckled with authors’ names and comments about both reading and man’s relationship to books.
Kiš is particularly preoccupied with how humans are wont to believe everything they read, and the ways in which written history (or fiction) can thus be harnessed in order to distort reality. As the narrator of ‘The Book of Kings and Fools’ says: ‘most mortals look upon any printed word as Holy Writ’ but at the same time, as the platitudinous conclusion of ‘Pro Patria Mori’ explains, ‘History is written by the victors.’ When you factor in ‘the need people have to give history meaning in our godless world,’ as pointed out in another story, then it is clear that history holds enormous power and influence in modern society – and thus a special place in the work of Kiš. The bravura title story explores the role of history as such, and seeks to exalt the life of the Everyman forgotten by conventional histories. The narrator explains that ‘history is the sum of human destinies, the totality of ephemeral happenings,’ so we ignore the plight of the ordinary person at our peril. To lose track of the individual is to lose track of the meaning of history.
As with any author writing short stories that touch on legends, forgery, philosophy and arcane reading, Jorge Luis Borges is a prime influence. From the multiple references to the Kabbalah, to the penchant for poetic and synecdochical lists, many of the same elements that distinguish Borges's literary output are found in Kiš’s fiction. Like his Argentine forebear, Kiš is obsessed by what the narrator of ‘The Master and the Disciple’ describes as ‘how an idea, the shadow of an idea … can lead to the grace of form.’ It is this obsession that leads to the precise prose style and ‘biblical eloquence’ of the stories. The carefully crafted stories of The Encyclopedia of the Dead also touch on fantastical subject matter, the stalking ground of Borges and his compatriot Cortázar – both of whose names appear in the book's postscript. Yet as with his metafictional flirtations, Kiš never fully engages with the uncanny as the Argentines had before him. For example, after 25 painstakingly descriptive pages in ‘The Encyclopedia of the Dead,’ detailing a secret library where the lives of every ordinary person are recorded in bewildering and inconceivable levels of detail, the author proceeds to tear this world down with a few slashes of his pen. He does so using the oldest trick in the book: by revealing that the library was just part of a dream from which the narrator awakes 'drenched in sweat.'
When asked by the New Yorker about changing the ending of the story, Kiš was defiant, saying that he was ‘a realistic writer.’ Obviously his conception of realism doesn't exclude levitating biblical wizards or third-century youths who sleep for 180 years, but we take his point all the same. Kiš was not a committed writer, but his goal in writing stories like ‘The Encyclopedia of the Dead’ was not so much to make a point about literature itself (as Borges would have done) as to question the white-washing and eliminatory effects of history. Where Borges bent in on himself and literature, refusing to engage with the politics of his time in his fiction, Kiš makes recent history the focus of his writing.
Nevertheless, Kiš was openly accused of plagiarising Borges, along with Joyce and Karlo Štajner, in his 1976 collection, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. Looking at this collection, it’s hard not to think that his accusers had a point. Yet to stop there would be hugely unfair. In fact, it’s just when the Borgesian building blocks have tempted the reader into thinking that he knows what’s coming that Kiš will catch them out, suddenly turning the other way. The stories of The Encyclopedia of the Dead delight precisely in their ability to deftly wrong-foot the reader like this, turning instantly recognisable raw materials into something original and affecting. We should be grateful for Penguin’s decision to bring the Yugoslav’s work back into the fold.
Short stories are often a hard sell in the UK. They don’t form part of the national literary culture – in the way that they do in the US, for instance – and British readers are often loath to part with a tenner for less than 200 pages. The sales figures show that Anglo-Saxon readers tend to shy away from translated fiction, too. With this in mind, Penguin’s decision to republish a 167-page collection, first translated from the Serbo-Croat in 1989, might well seem either anti-commercial or downright reckless. But when we're speaking of a talent like Kiš's, complaints about profit margins might well be as churlish, or as misplaced, as lamentations about the passing of the orthodox short story format. The tales that make up the collection are varied in tone and subject matter but are loosely united, as the author admits in his postscript, ‘under the sign of a theme I would call metaphysical.’ Death, he notes, ‘has been one of the obsessive themes of literature.’ And the 20th century’s theatre of butchery, which claimed Kiš's own Jewish father as well as many of his relatives, offered no shortage of death and destruction, and hence of inspiration for these stories.
The first story in the book, ‘Simon Magus’, is a variation of a tale related in the New Testament Apocrypha about the biblical figure of Simon the Sorcerer. In it, Simon challenges Peter and the disciples about their beliefs, before levitating and finally meeting a tragic end. Another story retells the eastern legend of the Seven Sleepers, a key Christian and Muslim parable where early believers of a religion flee to the mountains to escape persecution before being trapped in a cave by the authorities. There they sleep for almost two centuries, before being awakened and shocked by the changed reality. Other tales take place at various different historical moments in the 20th century, in a selection of cities dotted across Europe. But whilst the settings and timings are varied, the language remains the same. It is stately and precise, its rhythms refreshingly different to those of both the slangy postmodernist and the serious modernist, with his interminable concatenations. There is something timeless about the prose's austerity. It is like the language of the Encyclopedia of the Dead itself — not this book, but the one that appears in the story of the same name, and is described there as ‘an unlikely amalgam of encyclopedic conciseness and biblical eloquence.’
One of the few points at which one might reasonably guess at the content's origins in the second half of the 20th century is the metafictional opening to ‘The Mirror of the Unknown’, which starts: ‘This story does not begin abruptly, in media res, but gradually, as when night falls in the woods.’ The passage continues with a sequence of rib-nudging asides in parentheses: ‘(thinks the girl, more or less) … (… they are poisonous mushrooms … which she does not, should not know.)’ However, these highbrow tactics are more of a gentle gesture towards the metafictional than the bourgeois-baiting transgressive pokes associated with Kiš’s North American counterpart: more Tristram Shandy than Lost in the Funhouse. This self-reflexive impulse of Kiš is simply part of a greater reflection on the acts of reading and writing – the act of literariness, we might say – and the text is speckled with authors’ names and comments about both reading and man’s relationship to books.
Kiš is particularly preoccupied with how humans are wont to believe everything they read, and the ways in which written history (or fiction) can thus be harnessed in order to distort reality. As the narrator of ‘The Book of Kings and Fools’ says: ‘most mortals look upon any printed word as Holy Writ’ but at the same time, as the platitudinous conclusion of ‘Pro Patria Mori’ explains, ‘History is written by the victors.’ When you factor in ‘the need people have to give history meaning in our godless world,’ as pointed out in another story, then it is clear that history holds enormous power and influence in modern society – and thus a special place in the work of Kiš. The bravura title story explores the role of history as such, and seeks to exalt the life of the Everyman forgotten by conventional histories. The narrator explains that ‘history is the sum of human destinies, the totality of ephemeral happenings,’ so we ignore the plight of the ordinary person at our peril. To lose track of the individual is to lose track of the meaning of history.
As with any author writing short stories that touch on legends, forgery, philosophy and arcane reading, Jorge Luis Borges is a prime influence. From the multiple references to the Kabbalah, to the penchant for poetic and synecdochical lists, many of the same elements that distinguish Borges's literary output are found in Kiš’s fiction. Like his Argentine forebear, Kiš is obsessed by what the narrator of ‘The Master and the Disciple’ describes as ‘how an idea, the shadow of an idea … can lead to the grace of form.’ It is this obsession that leads to the precise prose style and ‘biblical eloquence’ of the stories. The carefully crafted stories of The Encyclopedia of the Dead also touch on fantastical subject matter, the stalking ground of Borges and his compatriot Cortázar – both of whose names appear in the book's postscript. Yet as with his metafictional flirtations, Kiš never fully engages with the uncanny as the Argentines had before him. For example, after 25 painstakingly descriptive pages in ‘The Encyclopedia of the Dead,’ detailing a secret library where the lives of every ordinary person are recorded in bewildering and inconceivable levels of detail, the author proceeds to tear this world down with a few slashes of his pen. He does so using the oldest trick in the book: by revealing that the library was just part of a dream from which the narrator awakes 'drenched in sweat.'
When asked by the New Yorker about changing the ending of the story, Kiš was defiant, saying that he was ‘a realistic writer.’ Obviously his conception of realism doesn't exclude levitating biblical wizards or third-century youths who sleep for 180 years, but we take his point all the same. Kiš was not a committed writer, but his goal in writing stories like ‘The Encyclopedia of the Dead’ was not so much to make a point about literature itself (as Borges would have done) as to question the white-washing and eliminatory effects of history. Where Borges bent in on himself and literature, refusing to engage with the politics of his time in his fiction, Kiš makes recent history the focus of his writing.
Nevertheless, Kiš was openly accused of plagiarising Borges, along with Joyce and Karlo Štajner, in his 1976 collection, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. Looking at this collection, it’s hard not to think that his accusers had a point. Yet to stop there would be hugely unfair. In fact, it’s just when the Borgesian building blocks have tempted the reader into thinking that he knows what’s coming that Kiš will catch them out, suddenly turning the other way. The stories of The Encyclopedia of the Dead delight precisely in their ability to deftly wrong-foot the reader like this, turning instantly recognisable raw materials into something original and affecting. We should be grateful for Penguin’s decision to bring the Yugoslav’s work back into the fold.