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Context N°9

With Kathy Acker, Vsevolod Brodsky, Stanley Elkin, William H. Gass, Aleksandar Hemon, Roman Jakobson, Danilo Kis, Mark Crispin Miller, Raymond Queneau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kathleen Wheeler, Curtis White, Barbara White, Marguerite Young

Context


Reading Danilo Kis
Aleksandar Hemon

Danilo Kis opens his novel Garden, Ashes with a tray, as though offering his enormous talent on it. The narrator’s mother carries the tray, with a jar of honey and a bottle of cod-liver oil, along with "the amber hues of sunny days, thick concentrates full of intoxicating aromas." Kis goes beyond the content, as it were, and gives us a nearly microscopic description of the form of the tray, with "a raised rim" along its edges and flaky patches of nickel that look like "tin foil pressed out under fingernails." There are "tiny decorative protuberances—a whole chain of little metallic grapes" on the outer edge of the rim, which can be felt "like Braille letters, under the flesh of the thumb." And around those grapes "ringlike layers of grease had collected, barely visible, like shadows cast by little cupolas."

The tray is tactile—the reader touches it with Andi’s mother. Kis is never afraid to go from a small detail to an even smaller detail—from the "grapes" to their tiny shadows. The realm of the barely visible is where Kis is most comfortable, but once he perceives it he augments it—the tray is taking up the entire screen in the mind’s projection room. He achieves this by comparing the grease rings with cupola shadows—the comparison spanning from the infinitesimal to the humungous. At the same time, the emotional size of the tray is increased by upgrading the little jars and glasses to "specimens of the new lands at which the foolish barge of our days would be putting ashore." The patience with which Kis goes deeper into the tray, looking for a more precise detail, betokens his conviction that the exactness of the detail, as miniscule as it may be, opens doors into whole new worlds. Choosing a unique, specific detail, Kis implies that the world and human life consist of an infinite number of details, and that the writer’s job is to uncover them, to expose them to the reader’s eye. Indeed, by opening his novel with the tray rendered through a selection of details, Kis shows his confidence in the reader’s intelligence and curiosity about the world. How unlike the contemporary writer’s belief that he or she needs to sell his or her feeble story in the first paragraph, lest the reader run off to watch television!

Opening a novel with a beaten-up tray loaded with details is the exact opposite of the God-like point of view of the "great-novel" openings: say, a Dickensian description of the city; or Tolstoy’s great generalizations about happy and unhappy families; or Bellow’s immediate invasion of Herzog’s mind. Many a novel opens with a peal of self-importance, which Kis systematically ignores, always opting for the barely visible. What is even more astonishing is that Garden, Ashes is a novel about the Holocaust—we enter the apocalyptic stage with the tray in our hands. By insisting on the material and the particular on the tray, along with giving the narrative voice to a boy, Andi Scham, Kis instantly dismisses the ambition of explaining the Holocaust—the most we can hope for is experiencing it, our experience admittedly limited to the barely visible, but all the more true because of that.

The Holocaust is an Apocalypse, a cosmic event, and Kis comfortably covers the cosmic—in the sense of all-inclusive—end of human experience. Eduard Scham, Andi’s father, who will disappear in Auschwitz, is a crazy prophet or a prophetic madman—he gives ranting, messianic sermons to his befuddled family and uses a map of the sky to follow stars on his peregrinations. He works on the Bus, Ship, Rail, and Air Travel Guide, which at some point goes well beyond its initial ambition of answering the question: "How can we travel to Nicaragua?" It becomes a cosmological compendium, a description of the universe that will perish with him in Auschwitz, for which he collects literature "in the most diverse disciplines, in almost all European languages." Kis, ever a master of lists, conveys the magnitude of Eduard Scham’s project by listing meticulously, in neat alphabetical order, some two hundred disciplines he explored in writing his travel guide. Once the novel is raised to a cosmic/Apocalyptic level, "the multitude of details that make up human life" (The Encyclopedia of the Dead) that Kis has so patiently collected attains cosmic proportions and universal importance—the details are the particles the universe of Garden, Ashes is made of. Kis is much like the contemporary physicist who needs to study matter at sub-atomic levels in order to understand how space came into being.

As if that is not enough, there is another layer on Kis’s tray. The tray and the feverish, precise manner in which it is described is an homage to Bruno Schulz, the great writer of The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. (One of Kis’s novels is entitled Hourglass.) It is clear that Kis studied Schulz describing the minutiae of his provincial hometown and family, including everything from neglected back lots to messy morning beds; from the precise hues of sunlight in August to a stamp collection exhilarating a boy. Moreover, Eduard Scham is a completely Schulzian father, a madman-prophet, who thinks up a cosmos, much like the father in The Street of Crocodiles, who imagines a bird cosmos and thinks up a metaphysics based on tailor dummies. It is in Schulz’s work that Kis saw it was possible to spin a cosmos out of the microscopic. "Bruno Schulz is my God!" Kis is known to have said, and that should be understood not as blurry-eyed worshipping, but a statement of awareness of whom he inherited a universe from, who bequeathed him the world simultaneously horrible and beautiful.

Kis is never afraid to direct the reader’s attention toward the writers he is in dialogue with. For him writing means participating in a network of experiences and meanings, spanning across time and languages. Kis does not "borrow" from other writers, he communicates with them. Garden, Ashes contains passages that point directly toward Proust (Andi Scham in the state between being asleep and being awake) and Borges—Eduard Scham’s compendium is a Borgesian book par excellence.

Kis claimed that A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, a book about the Apocalypse of Stalinist purges, was a response to Borges’s "Universal History of Infamy"—Kis wanted to show that the real universal infamy was the history that devours its children, indeed, the millions of them caught up in it at any given time. But Borges is not the only writer Kis is involved in an exchange with—there is also Isaac Babel. In the story "The Magic Card Dealing" from A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Dr. Taube is killed because his murderer lost a card game in the prison camp where Dr. Taube used to work as a physician prisoner—the pot in the game was Dr. Taube’s life. The murderer, Kotik, is known as the Artist—we are in an inverted universe, where murderers are artists and artists are murderers. He sneaks up on Dr. Taube, and crushes his skull with a jimmy. As he sneaks out, he passes by a porter, "a former Cossack, who was so full of vodka that he rocked slightly while sleeping in an upright position, as though in a saddle." A lesser writer would stick to the suspense of the murder scene, or the symbolism of the Artist/murderer killing (and getting away with it) a physician/life-savior. But Kis’s gaze is always interested in the barely noticeable: he has time and patience to offer the reader a peek into the Cossack’s dreams. The Cossack must be dreaming of his time in the Red Cavalry, the time described by Babel in his great book, the time of revolutionary fervor and the usual pogroms. The Cossack could also be dreaming about the flogging of Boris Davidovich’s ancestor in the title story, immediately following "The Magic Card Dealing" in the book. The detail is thus providing a link in a network of leitmotivs and in a larger network of the historic experience of the Soviet revolution, as rendered in Babel’s masterpiece. In one swift move, demanding merely a side glance, Kis loads up the detail with historical, literary and structural referentiality—a strategy so prevalent and ubiquitous in his work that it seems gratuitous to isolate one instance.

Kis’s sensibility is a materialist one—the world consists of material particles that are experienced by people in history—but he employs his detail in trying to reach philosophical depth. This requires even more, rather than less, precisionÜthe thought has to be pinpointed by the specificity of the detail. Here is an example: in Garden, Ashes, little Andi Scham suffers from insomnia, caused by the presence of death in his thoughts (and everywhere around him):

    When I thought of death, and I thought of it as soon as darkness enveloped the room, the thought unwound itself, like a roll of black silk thrown from a fourth-floor window. No matter how hard I tried the thought inexorably unwound to the end, borne along by its own weight.
Every time I read this passage I hear the fluttering of the silk—the sound of death. The thought has been materialized: the black silk roll is the objective correlative of a death thought, evanescent and evasive though it may be. But Kis knows that to achieve this, the writing has to be absolutely precise: the death silk roll has to be thrown from the fourth floor, not the third floor or the fifth floor. (In the Serbo-Croatian original, the roll is thrown from the third floor, but that is because what is the first floor in the U.S. is the mezzanine in Europe—the translator, to his credit, felt compelled to be just as precise as Kis.) There is, of course, no way of knowing what the difference in the roll unwinding would be if it were thrown from the third or the fifth floor, but Kis’s refusal to leave it open to negotiation suggests that he knows exactly what he is talking about—and who are we not to trust him? Clearly, we are in the hands of a master. It is the same confidence in one’s own experience and competence and the reader’s intelligence—a far cry from cowardly contemporary writing, ever fretting over the impatient reader.

Kis’s ability to infuse detail with the material, cosmic, literary, cultural, self-referential, historic, structural and philosophical, and to do it with self-effacing ease, makes him one of the greatest twentieth-century writers. His books are not page-turners, whose pages one keeps turning in search of something to read, but page-gazers—one keeps going back to the same page, compelled to go deeper and find more below the surface of words. This is a sign of poetry at its purest—the ability to condense the world and concentrate experience, whereby the language is not a mirror, but a magnifying glass, or indeed a prism. No wonder that Joseph Brodsky considered Garden, Ashes "the best book produced on the Continent in the post-war period." The scarcity of Kis’s work—four novels, a few essays—is in a strange way a testimony to his talent, even if his life was cut short by cancer. If writers were paid per unit of meaningfulness rather than per word or per page, he would have been one of the richest.