The encyclopedia of the dead

Danilo Kiš—possibly the writer who most embodied the ideals and contradictions of Yugoslavia—reinvented the short story. It had not advanced since the days of Chekhov or Mansfield, who wrote under the belief that life’s truths could be discerned from the portrayal of a small slice of it: the universal within the particular.

Kiš believed that this kind of story had been rendered obsolete by World War II. Human meaning “could no longer be summoned by an image or gesture.” (xiii) Europe’s cultural symbolism, demagnetised by atrocity, was in need of re-enchantment. Kiš attempted this through a reconciliation of literature with history: imagining lost pasts in fictional terms, summoning real events with a quasi-historical veneer, he used the short story to probe at the boundary between history and fiction. What he achieved can only be described as “fictional non-fiction.”

Simon Magus hearkens back to an era of competing gnosticisms in the decades following Christ’s death. The eponymous prophet (a real historical figure) is seeking to win over fresh converts. On a challenge—a dare—from a rival, he proves his holiness with a miracle, but dies in the act. As news of the episode spreads, he gains new followers in posterity. They gather for the disinternment of his body. What they see profanes his memory:

The face of Simon Magus was a mass of leprous corruption, and his eye sockets had worms peering out of them. Only his yellow teeth remained intact, grinning as if he were convulsed or laughing... “This, too, is proof of his teaching. Man’s life is decay and perdition, and the world is in the hands of tyrants.” (21)

Though the miracle of Simon Magus would appear to confirm his prophecies, everyone discards them in his death as irrelevant. It seems direct contact with the truth is not enough to steer the course of history. So the prophet’s legacy dissipates, his most faithful follower, the prostitute Sophia, returning to the brothel, her spirit “moving on to a new illusion.”

The same theme recurs in The Book of Kings and Fools. Here, more than anywhere else, Kiš obtains his intriguing blend of fiction and history. The story is an account of a document that purports to reveal a Jewish conspiracy for worldwide domination, and its subsequent exposure as a forgery. The characters in this story are real people; the document, known in the story as The Conspiracy is based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Even after The Conspiracy—like The Protocols—is shown to be a hoax, anti-Semites continue to assert its truth. There is a dark mirror irony here: The Conspiracy, which purports to be a piece of history, is actually a work of fiction (some would simply call it a lie); Kiš’s writing, meanwhile, is presented as a story, but depicts real people and events. Which is true and which false? Which is honest and which genuine? Like in Simon Magus, at the point of revelation—where the hoax is revealed, with truth and lies clearly separated—history would appear not to care about the answer. It continues along its trajectory, led by tyrants and heroes, regardless of whether we grasp its meaning.

Yet Kiš holds out a glimmer of hope that we might overcome our historical horizons, laying this forth in The Encyclopedia of the Dead. This story takes the form of a notebook kept by a woman visiting an academy in Stockholm. Still mourning the death of her father not two weeks prior, she is shocked to discover his entry in the eponymous encyclopaedia, which has recorded every facet of his life both significant and insignificant. The only condition for inclusion in the encyclopaedia is that you are not famous: “It is the work of a religious organization or sect whose democratic program stresses an egalitarian vision of the world of the dead. . .” (34)

As the narrator reads, she notes details “unimportant to anyone but my mother and me: names, places, dates.” (32) Somehow, from mere facts, numbers, and dates, she extrapolates beautiful scenes of her home: “the snow on distant mountain peaks, the bare trees, the frozen river with children skating past... cows mooed in their barns, and the scarlet reflection of the morning sun glistened on the cottage windows and melted the icicles hanging from their gutters.” (33)

It is hard to imagine how a catalogue of facts as mundane as “the price of the stove, bed, and wardrobe” (41) might evoke such an intense vista of imagery. When the woman is confronted with the objective details of her father’s life, some act of imagination is still necessary to animate them. At this point we are reminded that we are not actually reading the entry in the encyclopaedia, but notes made about them which have performed the necessary act of imagination for us. Like a kaleidoscope, the reader also performs this same imaginative act when he reads The Encyclopedia of the Dead.

Something about the highly personal act of imagination is necessary to the function of history. The threat of any historical theory is that it swallows up the significance of the individual life by re-conceptualising and re-constituting it after the fact. Even as we triangulate past and future in a perfect, unchanging whole, the personal experience on which it was built remains outside the logical superstructure. It has a slumbering vitality that threatens to burst out of its strictures at any moment:

... nothing in the history of mankind is ever repeated, things that at first glance seem the same are scarcely even similar; each individual is a star unto himself, everything happens always and never, all things repeat themselves endlessly and unrepeatedly. (41)

These contradictions are further teased out via a story-within-the-story concerning the father—a land surveyor by profession—and his first encounter with the sea:

[It] would remain with him – a revelation, a secret, a vision never put into words. After all those years he was not quite sure himself, whether what he had seen was the open sea or merely the horizon, and the only true sea for him remained the aquamarine of maps, where depths are designated by a darker shade of blue, shallows by a lighter shade. (43)

Having seen the sea with his own eyes, the father sublates it into the idea he has built up of the sea, one recorded in charts and records. The map is not the territory, but as the former grows, the latter appears to diminish, receding to a tiny point of singularity that might destroy everything we have made intelligible—if we only had the courage to look upon it. To his dying days the father is reluctant to go back to the sea, as if a close encounter “might destroy the distant vision that had dazzled him.” (43)

The story ends—somewhat cruelly, and not entirely to my liking—with the narrator waking up. On re-reads, the impossibility of the encyclopaedia becomes more and more apparent. How could a collection of numbers and facts possibly evoke the full texture of lived experience? Its egalitarian hope could have only been a dream. Yet remembering how her father had painted a flower in the dream, the narrator sketches it onto a piece of paper and recognises it as the sarcoma that killed him.

This insight into her father’s death only happens at the intersection of waking and dreaming. So do these stories establish and complete themselves within a liminal space where fiction overlaps with non-fiction. The dream-world, built up from errors in our unconscious information processing, gives insight into the real-world. Invented notebooks recover the significance of a life. Real prophets are re-inserted into the historical record with made-up miracles. The revelation of a literary hoax, given a thin fictional veneer, mirrors back the moral fraud of the real document. For Kiš, the lines between fiction and history are not so neatly unravelled. Even as the two bleed into each other, somewhere between them we might find the truth.

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