THE LUTE AND THE SCARS

THE LUTE AND THE SCARS

DANILO KI
Š

Preface by Adam Thirlwell

Translated and with an Afterword by John K. Cox

CONTENTS

The Attic
Psalm 44
Garden, Ashes
Early Sorrows
Hourglass
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews

1

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

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, Ki
š
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 Ki
š
: 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, Ki
š
kept offering up new definitions of Borges
’
s radical invention. It was, he said once, a

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 Ki
š
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 Ki
š
anthology of irritation at the previous deadend methods:

But the history of world literature isn
’
t a history of repeats. The Borges system was a gorgeous thing, but Ki
š
invented his own kink in that tradition too. For Borges
’
s stories are inventions from the innocent half of the twentieth century. Whereas Ki
š
came in the aftermath. The entropic centre of his electric fictions is the century
’
s twin death camps: the camps of the Nazi r
é
gime, and the camps of the Soviet r
é
gime. All history is crime, in Ki
š
’
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 Ki
š
knew: it was barrio gangsters and pistolets. So that where Borges
’
s stories were really always investigations of metaphysics, wrote Ki
š
, 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 Ki
š
called
schizopsychology
—
the mass and murderous neuroses.

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 Ki
š
’
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 Ki
š
. Its job, in other words, was the restoration of corrupted texts.

2

In Ki
š
’
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 Ki
š
’
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 Ki
š
’
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 Ki
š
’
s love of the list:

Which is another way of saying that the detail in Ki
š
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 Ki
š
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.

3

Ki
š
’
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 Ki
š
’
s art. The reader of this archive encounters all of Ki
š
’
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:

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 Ki
š
. They will make the reader Ki
š
ified. And so eventually this newly Ki
š
ified 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 Ki
š
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:
m
é
tiers
, market forces, money, adventure, hunting, weapons, knives, traps, blood, animal anatomy, zoology, far-off exotic regions, nocturnal animal noises, Lafontaine
’
s fables . . .
”
Yes, writes Ki
š
, 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.
”

4

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 Ki
š
’
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: