Finding a Form (16 page)

Uniqueness in such a vast ocean of similar otherness loses its value, however, for what is the worth of so many hen’s teeth, though they enable dentists to furnish police with the identities of the mysteriously deceased? Unique combinations of the most common words can, during the run of even a few lines, be discovered: (1)
the plumber has lost my latchkey; (2) twins were born to the Tollivers in a speeding Tip Top taxi; (3) Dollars will defeat Doughnuts by the length of a cold nose in the one-legged sack race. The list of facts and features, people and occasions, that constitute the narrator’s father’s life is a carefully selected one, with much more omitted than included, for if nothing were excluded and no decision made as to what mattered and what did not (since, if every person weighs on the scale of history—each unique as a droplet in a sneeze—so does every ant at the picnic and every loon in the lake and every coasting cloud and every breeze), then even a short life would receive an endless recital, and have a heaviness which would break the pan of every balance. Uniqueness needs numbers, and is no idle pursuit.

Moreover, although a mouthful of chilled wine on the tavern’s cuff may be a one-of-a-kind occasion in terms of the wine’s wheaty color, oaky taste, and nasturtium-heavy nose—combining to make it singular in its swallow—no listing will lend that fact any further interest unless the interest were to lie in the quality of the description of such a mouthful, in the choice of its moment to appear in some larger narration, and in the significance, then, the wine’s golden nature can receive from the chronicle as a whole, as well as whatever feeling the music of the language or the pace of its disclosures, can generate, or gain from an imagery that may revive its taste. In short, only the style of the description will be capable of imbuing the event with a value that extends beyond the one of merely existing, since existing is easy to do (anything that
is
at all has done it). It is as easy to be as not to be (for not being is also the mildest form of exercise). Nevertheless, few of these examples of the world’s bric-a-brac have their existence realized in language; fewer still in language that lasts, language that lives through the dying it describes; that outlasts the endings it observes and celebrates; language like that which Danilo Kiš has contrived for the list that is this biography, and the death, too, that the story suggests grows like a noxious flower from the soil of life itself, even as that life is led.

However, the life whose tale is told in this story has had to rise from the world in which we presume it was first enacted through the language of these secret encylopediasts until it reaches the daughter’s astonished notes. There every layer is transformed by being dreamed (for these assiduously compiled volumes are not “real”); whereupon, on waking, the dream is remembered, with all its texts, and finally, for the reader, is recomposed and recited.

The allegory, now, is obvious, because the passions attributed to the society of chroniclers are, in fact, traditionally associated with the development of the novel: the novel with its endless appetite for facts, for the most paltry details, and with its egalitarian resolves, its awakened concern for simple ordinary people, and, very soon, for their simply ordinary daily lives, their family histories, their love
affairs and marriages, their business successes, their parish politics, their bedroom wars, as well as their dismal domestic tranquillities.

So the sun fails to flash from the slowly turning leather toes of those who were hung like rustlers from the leaning poles. This allows us to infer that their shoes must have been unpolished, perhaps abraded, possibly suede. Still, Belgrade is gray by custom and habit: grimy skies and grimy gray walls, wet gray streets, faces worn as the stones, and so forth, hence an absence of flash; gutters gray with slow gray water, and the rain faint, almost not there, light as fog, and so forth, hence a glitterless atmosphere; gray caps and collars coming down the damp street, gray coats, damp too, soot becoming a moist gray paste, bomb dust still in the wet air, too wet to drift, soon a drizzle of dust, and so forth; this parade of gray is the novel capturing the world in words, as if that were enough, as if that were all there was to it.

Then the reader arrives, the note taker, the critic, reading because of an idiosyncratic interest, because it is all, somehow, autobiographical—
Madame Bovary
or
Moby-Dick—c’est moi
—and matching what each reader knows of the text with what each knows of the world, and watching the two sets scratch, like cats, their facts out. But what the reader reads is fiction (or what Danilo Kiš says has been dreamed in his story), and what the reader knows of the world is most likely incoherent, ideologized, incomplete, self-serving bunk.

Perhaps the most impressive piece in this collection is a Borgesian pseudo story, what Kiš calls a “faction”—a monster with an essay for a body and a fiction for a head (occasionally vice versa). Called “The Book of Kings and Fools” (not, I think, a happy title), it concerns the history of the notorious
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, a document that purports to reveal the plans of the Jews for world domination. Under Kiš’s skillful hands this text becomes a character in a tale of intrigue and triple-dealing not unlike the history of Boris Davidovich, with his many odd jobs, his aliases, his incessant shifts of venue; because a lie that so many desire to believe comes to exist like any deity or yeti or pernicious social myth,
propped up as it is by passion, poor character, and a grinding poverty of mind—one might say like the promised utopian fruits of the Russian Revolution, fruits that already lay rotting on the ground before the tree was fully leafed and were later served up as if they were made of precious metal, to admire but not to eat.

It is not unimportant to notice that when one speaks of the traditional novel, it is so often by referring to the psychology of its characters, the pattern of its plot, the accuracy of its environments; but when one is speaking of a fiction by Borges, Calvino, or Kiš, ideas come to dominate the discussion. Often a single notion controls the course of events, determines the fate of their imaginary agents, settles on the form of the whole. It is the sole sun of its system. Such fictions become meditations, but not by a Hazlitt or an Emerson, who might write to display the nature of their sensibilities and their intelligence as tourists in the region of some topic; but by a concept that searches for itself through its own exemplifications, where it finds itself realized somewhat in this facet or that aspect, as though it were the light that could not glisten from the slowly turning toe; a light that found no reflection in the puddles of the streets either, so gloomy was the so-called day, where the souls of the strung-up could not cast a shadow; and thus, in this negative way, seeks to define itself, not by the absence of reflection, but by the presence of writing. We can imagine, however, that the light did find at last the mirror of a woman powdering her nose in a narrow entryway, and about to mount the narrow, dark stairs. She might be going to her lover; however, that is an implication interesting only to former times. We—postmodernist trained—know she opened her compact to receive and illustrate and sustain the almost lost light … author of the page.

Every one of the nine stories constituting
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
concerns the character, corruption, and consequent fate of texts and the resulting endangerment of mind, bewilderment of heart, and debasement of the State that stem from such corruptions, as well as the advantages that accrue to politicians and their police.

But ideas aren’t literature, any more than remarks are, or plots, or people, or noble truths, or lively lies, or Belgrade’s morose gray streets; and I would not recommend the reading of Danilo Kiš on their account, or the reading of Jane Austen either. In Kiš’s case, where the concepts are inconsequentially derivative anyway, it is the consistent quality of the local prose that counts. It is how, sentence by sentence, the song is built and immeasurable meanings meant. It is the rich regalia of his rhetoric that leads us to acknowledge his authority. On his page, trappings are not trappings but sovereignty itself. Hence it is not the plan, devious of design as it is, but its nearly faultless execution that takes away the breath and produces admiration.

I
n an early, autobiographical essay, written for school, Friedrich Nietzsche recalled that he found Naumburg overly busy—dusty and indifferent as well as bewilderingly various—after the close, quiet, neighborly life of Röcken, the tiny country village where he was born. Naumburg would shrink as his own mind woke and widened, of course, but the boy could not immediately realize in what sleepy surroundings he would endure his early dreams. Over the years this decidedly Pietist community, peopled in large part by pensioners with their defensive pretensions, had lost its economic position to Leipzig, its cultural eminence to Dresden, its political boldness to repeated disappointment (even the intellectual center of the Pietist movement had shifted to Halle), and it was now so reluctant to grow or change that its population of thirteen thousand seemed to increase significantly when the three Nietzsches arrived.

Nietzsche’s mother, having lost her husband, then their child, and somewhat at a loss herself, accepted the life of a widowed Frau Pastor with a readiness to run from any risk unusual in one still an attractive twenty-three; although, outside her husband’s household, which continued to include his mother and two sisters, she had little chance to obtain a decent livelihood. Pastor Nietzsche, who suffered from Socratic fits of abstraction and debilitating glooms, was as devoted a royalist as he was a Lutheran, recognizing, according to doctrine, the descent of divinity from God to
kings. He was outraged and humiliated by the revolution of 1848, when his son’s namesake, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, bowed to the demands of an upstart rabble and, as a sign of submission, put on their rebellion’s cockade. The pastor’s brain softened, as they described such things then, and he died blind, in madness and despair, the next year.

In death, Nietzsche’s father became what he only might have been in life: the simple good man, loved by all who knew him, whose shoes his son’s small feet would grow to fill, and whose virtuous path those feet would faithfully follow. At the age of four, Nietzsche’s future with his father was complete, but his future with his father’s eulogistic figure had just begun. In
Nietzsche, “The Last Antipolitical German,”
Peter Bergmann reports that in the alley behind his new home, Nietzsche more than once heard, as though in a play he had yet to read, his father’s ghostly warning voice. Of what did it warn him? Of disobedience, no doubt, although it would be more romantic to imagine that it warned him of his fate. “You are the image of your father,” his grandaunt wrote upon the occasion of his confirmation, willing the resemblance, for at sixteen he was already beginning to doubt his vocation and smudge the family likeness. Nevertheless, Nietzsche would return to Naumburg with his own madness forty years later, and there, nursed by his mother as his father had been, he would affright visitors with the hoarse howls of his increasingly ravenous and unkempt death.

So, safely keeping to her husband’s orbit, and wearing his village pieties like a medal round her neck, Nietzsche’s mother took her son and daughter, Elisabeth, to nearby Naumburg, where the survivors, rejoining the two spinster aunts, squeezed into the grandmother’s gaunt back rooms, submitting to her regimen and rule as well, while inadvertently completing the circle of skirts which was later to account, in many minds, for the philosopher’s misogyny, and soothe if not excuse its sting.

Like many of Nietzsche’s aversions, this one would be misunderstood. In his day, women not only carried the venereal consequences
which would later infect him (as historical suspicion has it); they also bore much of the culture onward the way they bore babies; and, as the philosopher would diagnose and define their case, they had a community of ailments to show for their service. Among them the passive emotions flourished; resentment drove the buggy in which religious solace rode; misdirected energy was relieved by flashes of torpidity; female intelligence and talent went into the management of the male and the making of coquettes, shrews, majordomo mothers, humorless saints and drones. It was common knowledge that their masters—those self-designated kings of creation—could be led by the nose, if not by the penis, to whatever place it was wished to put them, and into whatever project it was desired their powers should be employed. Nietzsche clearly preferred unconventional and emancipated women like Cosima Wagner, Malwida von Meysenburg, and Lou Salomé. “Go to women?” he wrote, “Then take the whip,” but in that famous jokey photo of himself and Paul Rée, pulling a cart like a pair of oxen, it is Lou’s hand that holds the knotted rope.