Finding a Form (15 page)

There is an immense nostalgia in Ford, a large looking back, and his impressionism is the blur a double-vision sometimes makes. I suspect that many critical theories exist to deny and obscure this tension between local stages in the loop, and that makes an ambiguous critical terminology essential. I am one thing, and a peaceful whole, the theory says, when in fact it is plural, and in quarreling pieces. Ford does not employ an academic jargon, nor does his language Heidegger a holiness his vision does not have. He does not willfully obscure his case, yet he has the nineteenth-century novel in his blood and admiration. At the same time, his art, his unrivaled technique, his skill of finger, as we might say, his thorough sense of himself as an artist (again, in the old sense), requires him to go as his artistic skill and artistic conscience require. Which direction is the blood to run? hither? or yon?

The theory of Impressionism (I now dignify it with the capital letter it has become accustomed to) is a wonderful theory. It makes no sense at all—in Hume, or James, or Ford, in Monet or in Bonnard—but it allows subversion to go on with the approval of the subverted. “The Impressionists taught us that snow is sometimes purple,” a teacher of mine once said, and apparently it was
important for us folks to think so—which we did. We do. After all, if the practices of these writers and painters are a little peculiar, they are still pointing out to us truths about the world it is vital for us to know: like the way the sun’s rays blow into straw, the way our memory of Mr. Slack betrays our dismay about Millicent.

D
anilo Kiš was born in Subotica. To my Western ears, the name seems that of an imaginary city. However, Subotica is located in Yugoslavia, a country once put together out of bits and pieces like Dr. Frankenstein’s notorious experiment: impressive when it walked at all, but making any move with difficulty. Kiš died before the monster began devouring itself: eating its own heart with its own teeth.

Subotica is near enough the Hungarian and Romanian borders that I can easily conceive it drifting into either country like a cloud: a dozen languages intermingling, languages rearranging their vowels to resemble one another the way politicians alter their allegiances. “The story I am about to tell,” the narrator of
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
begins,

Back and forth over this land, during Danilo Kiš’s childhood, armies and ideologies washed with the brutal regularity of surf. As a small boy and a Jew, in such circumstances, he was naturally surrounded by death and lies. There were the lies of hope and the lies of fear, the lies of love and the lies of hate, the lies of cynicism, the lies of faith. Lies were like the leaves the bombs blew from the trees. Any language, even the death rattle, can express them. What signs might point the way, might save anyone lost in a forest of deceit? Perhaps only an innocence which lends the eyes wonder without soiling the soul with belief. Danilo Kiš’s novel
Garden, Ashes
(his first to appear in English) describes the early life of such a boy, who, to escape small horrors as well as huge ones, crosses the borders between dream, daydream, and reality like a fugitive from each.

The second of his books to appear here,
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich
, although described as a novel, is a collection of short stories, each of which concerns a Jewish revolutionary enmeshed in fatal ontological as well as political difficulties. The tomb of the title story is a cenotaph, a grave without an occupant, because Boris Davidovich has too many personas to possess an identity and, just as Empedocles did into Etna, leaps into a vat of hot metal, disappearing without a trace like a repatriated god.

Boris Davidovich is born in 1891 or 1893 or 1896. The vagueness is precise. A few coins will falsify a record. Bureaucracies survive on the quality of their corruption. Born of a brief encounter, Boris
Davidovich’s name is never firmly in place. He is shortly also known as Bezrabotny, as Jacob Mauzer, and as M. U. Zemlyanikov, although B. D. Novsky is his predominant alias. One of his pseudonyms—B. N. Dolsky—is mistakenly understood to be that of a certain Podolsky. He employs numerous noms de plume, particularly Parabellum, Victor Tverdohlebov, Proletarsky, and N. L. Davidovich. If his name (“son of David”) will not fix him, neither will his occupation, for during his brief life (much of it spent in prison), he will be a smuggler, a butcher’s apprentice, a dishwasher, a legal clerk, and then, in a military arsenal, a cataloguer of artillery shells. He’s a dockworker too, the employee of a box-and-cardboard factory, as well as another which makes wallpaper. In France, he is arrested while harvesting grapes. He is also a fireman’s helper on a steam engine, a practicing engineer, a barge dispatcher, a journalist, agitator, terrorist, sharpshooter, soldier, student, political commissar, and diplomat—each for a period brief as a blink. The otherwise complete and thorough
Granat Encyclopedia of the Revolution
does not mention even one of his names—omissions which Kiš’s “story” intends to remedy—and even though his death can be exactly dated as 4 p.m., November 21, 1937, when he was transmogrified into a wisp of smoke above the hissing vat, he was reported to be alive by the Western press as late as June of 1956—in Moscow, where he was seen leaning like a shadow against a Kremlin wall.

Davidovich—Dolsky—Novsky (whoever he really is)—passes a sizable portion of his life in flight, in prison or in jail, in sanatoriums and hospitals recovering his wits or his nerves, in the editorial offices of fly-by-night revolutionary papers where he pens exposures and denunciations. An unspecified ideology seeps through the spaces of his existence like an unacknowledged pollutant, since every political faith is ultimately fatal. His actions are equally indeterminate in the sense that their aims are obscure, especially when violent, and seem bent on preserving some wholly imaginary purity. The language that most adequately depicts this life is interchangeably political and religious. There are heresies and their
persecution; there are denunciations, inquisitions, confessions, tortures, confrontations, crimes, criminals, and their investigators; there are betrayals, murders, assassinations, hoaxes, plots, cover-ups, smears, innuendos, allegations, fears, suspicions, mistrust.

We find him—Bezrabotny—Zemlyanikov (whoever he is)—living on the streets, in tenements and public baths, with a distant relative, a momentary friend: without a certifiable name, a fixed address, a permanent position, and, although supposedly subversive, without an identifiable belief. How many truths may we imagine he has denied in order to survive? how many lies has he been forced to affirm? how often can he have known which was which—lie or truth, affirmation or denial?

Yet this life, elusive as a vapor, can be constructed from the very gaps in its chronology, its lacunae and erasures, from documents no longer available, from possible forgeries and illegible letters, from the depositions of traitors and fanatics, the footnotes of plodding scholars, and the suspicious testimony of a conveniently invented sister.

This brilliant tale is characteristic Kiš, not only because of its subject matter (in this case, Jews who are destroyed by their very passion for justice), or because of its ironic yet factually deadpan tone, or on account of its apparently misplaced lyricism, so much like a songbird singing in a storm; but also because of the story’s tug of war with history—its total reliance on, and lack of belief in, texts.

(Indeed, several paragraphs back I wrote that Novsky, although definitely dead, had been seen in Moscow “leaning like a shadow against a Kremlin wall.” However, all that the London
Times
reported [according to Kiš’s possibly prejudiced account] was that he had been observed “near” that wall. Nor did the newspaper capitalize the word “wall”—clearly an anti-Communist slur. Nor do shadows lean: they are cast; they fall. The misleading elaboration should have read: “seen like a shadow thrown against a Kremlin Wall.” It is the noxious accumulations of such slightly skewed details that undermines the veracities of history more certainly than even its
invented facts, its poisonous biases, its outrageous omissions, its hypocritical objectivity, its illusion of causal connections, its pretentious claim to have explanatory power.)

Behind Borgesian concerns of this kind lurk two dismaying realizations. The first is that the force of individual events—even cataclysmic ones like the Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755, which shook a poem from Voltaire like a pippin from a tree, and then continued to trouble him during the composition of
Candide
—is but a cough in a clinic compared to the trauma of its descriptions, which conveyed the earthquake’s horror to more distant climes than the trembling earth was able, and tumbled it into
Candide
itself. Egregious errors of translation (“a virgin shall conceive” for “a maiden, or young woman, shall conceive,” to cite a notorious instance) alter history more powerfully than the simple, explicable truth. Falsified documents, qualifying emendations, misleading interpolations, clever deletions, can reshape events, not in their own region of reality, but in the characteristic way they reach men’s minds. Furthermore, texts, because they duplicitously repeat themselves each time they are read, and because they are subject to interpretation and commentary, belong to a more powerful realm of Being than the world of unrecurrent events, aging people, and transitory things.

The second, saddening realization is that unless, consequently, you can insert yourself into some account, unless your history has a History, you might as well not exist, so paltry are the normal powers of the present; and yet, if you manage to make your way into a text, or become defined by a set of documents, you will become a different being altogether; your proofs will rest in a file folder which will resemble your grave. Bureaucrats will burnish one medal, tarnish another, or strip you of both. The city which was given your name by removing another’s will regain in time its former designation. Or, tortured, you will tattle on yourself, and that tale, too, will be attached to your dossier and become your identity, your passport to history. Yet what is history but other eyes in other ages, arranging the data to suit their own policies, salting their grievances with your tears, advancing another false cause? If
your text serves the interests of some institution, of those who would be stronger, then your folder will fatten, will be frequently consulted, will be protected, imitated, polished like a rifle. Fame is, under these circumstances, your frequency of citation.

The title story of Kiš’s collection
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
is based on such melancholy considerations. It imagines that there is a Book of the Dead for nobodies compiled by a religious organization (resembling the archival activities of the Mormons, as the author’s notes observe). After the French Revolution proclaimed the equality of Man (true enough for corpses), subversive scriveners shelved these “This Was Your Life” biographies in alphabetically laid-out lower rooms of the Swedish Royal Library: a textual catacomb and historical Hades. As George Eliot remarked, history is really made by the myriad little people who lead hidden lives and rest presently in unvisited tombs. (I suspect that these bookish spaces mimic and invert those occupied by the Nobel Prize Committee, whose collection is, of course, largely of also-rans.) (The activities of this necrological society are as secret and multifarious as those of Borges’s now famous encyclopediasts, whose volumes create the countries of Tlön and Uqbar, and whose facts are so persuasively imagined that they begin to supplant the complacent realities of our own dessicated compendia.) (Indeed, much of Danilo Kiš’s “essays” and fictionalized memoirs seem as if they might occupy shrewdly placed parentheses within the Argentine master’s work.) (In the Swedish Academy’s peevish eyes, Borges is himself an also-ran.)

The narrator, finding herself locked in this dusty, chilly, familial place, looks for the life of her recently deceased father there, and finding it—complete as a warehouse inventory—takes highly condensed and hurried notes, notes which allow her to compose the present tale, a recollection of her journey to the Underworld. The entire trip turns out to have been a dream—alas, a moviemaker’s ending—which the body of the text suggests through montage and other visual devices, but whose alleged nonverbal origin leaves me unconvinced.

Inside this retold dream is a freeze-dried life—a list, really, of
one man’s coming and going—and like ordinary existence everywhere, its singular events are made of summarizing facts. It is a life composed of kinds, in which a characteristic catastrophe is surrounded by typical trivialities—incidents of outstanding ordinariness—while every region of reality is ransacked for examples of this and that which will be locally convincing yet symbolically vast: one more day of labor, one more wedding night, the tools, the flowers, the hot sun, the sheets, the weariness of love and work, always the same, though different, too, in the amount of dust, in the frequency of passion’s noises, the quality of surprise in the bride, the length of a chewy lunch; each variable, of which life at any moment is composed, as common as a word right out of the dictionary, repeatable as corn flakes, and the many sentences we make the same as well (good morning, Al—hiya, George—how they hangin’, Frank?), but none, in a context in which they rub one another (cold cream and skin, torn shirt, slipped disk), creating the same stridulation, the same significance, precisely the same result (an allergic rash, an embarrassed blush, a cry of pain like one of pleasure, or a rush of blood to the belly when fear is felt).