Danilo Kis' 'Encyclopedia of the Dead' [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 337-349]

338
PREDRAG MATVEJEVIC
is in fact an illusion, a consequence of the inertness of criticism and critics"
(Homo poeticus, 218).2 We are dealing, first and foremost, with a "desire
to find some original purity, sometimes in the world of childhood, sometimes within onself" (HP, 181). This is the "lyrical realism" of a writer
who does not wish to surrender to the sentimentality of lyricism, and to
whom realistic determinateness is foreign.
Basta, pepeo was greeted by critics as a masterpiece and translated
into many languages. They spoke of Proustian evocation: the author himself
does not deny his affinity for "the Proustian purple aureole around objects
and things" (HP, 228). In another book, however, it is already different.
Writing for Kis is a palimpsest: the relationship of what is written to what
has been erased, and the choice of "one of the layers of the palimpsest"
(HP, 214) are developed, transfigured, defamiliarized in each new endeavor.
"The subversive influence of biography" (Kis is fond of this useful term
of Sartre's), the shapes which it takes from work to work renew themselves
and multiply, exposing a peculiarity: "As far as I personally am concerned,
in my prose works I lie shamefully on the psychiatrist's couch, and attempt
through words to reach my traumas, the source of my own anxiety" (HP,
214). Kis' prose is, of course, very different from the type of novel or story
which makes use of traditional psychology or psychoanalysis, no less different than it is from any doctrine or ideology. Its indiscretions are of
an entirely different nature.
The author long sought the most suitable methods and techniques
to at least seemingly escape the first person. (The number and use of the
term "person" have their strict grammatical sense here.) Pescanik ("Hourglass"; 1972) the third volume of the biographical "family cycle" (which
together form a type of Bildungsroman, as the author himself has pointed
out), is written in the third person. In it Kis passes from the personality
of the narrator to the father known by the initials E. S., uncovering for
us, perhaps better than anyone else in our time, the intimate side of the
Holocaust. I yield the floor here to Pjotr Rawitz, who wrote a most appropriate introduction to Gallimard's translation of Pescanik just a short time
before he decided to leave this world of his own will. "Pescanik is a historical novel and a poem." (Rawitz does not mention that the work consists of sixty-seven unequal fragments: he too, probably, did not want
to enter here into a discussion of numbers.) "A feverish, deranged, diseased mind senses and assimilates a reality which is itself diseased, deranged
and feverish." In a state which alternates between absolute lucidity and a
unique sort of madness we meet Edward Sam (abbreviated to E. S.), whom
we know from Kis' previous books, especially Basta, pepeo. This is the
father or, better, the image of Kis' own father who disappeared at Auschwitz: the search for identity of the descendant and heir, i.e., the author
himself, the narrator who barely succeeds in retreating into the story or
hiding in it. (Let us note this mythological preoccupation with his father,