The scrupulously intelligent stories in The Encyclopedia of the Dead are fiction, but also, in an important way, about fiction. Implicit in the book is the question that all fiction raises by its very existence: what is real and what is not – and how can we tell the difference? In a story called ‘The Legend of the Sleepers’, Danilo Kis, a Yugoslav writer living in Paris, puts it this way: ‘Oh, who can divide dream from reality, day from night, night from dawn, memory from illusion?’
The question is clearly rhetorical, and Mr Kis’s apparatus of postscript and notes gives shape, purpose and an edgy, more documentary dimension to his storytelling. Mr Kis himself tells us that the stories are all about death – the one truly inescapable reality. Even if one of the legendary sleepers of Ephesus in ‘The Legend of the Sleepers’ may be dreaming his own death, death is the universal end of all our personal histories. The title story, ‘The Encyclopedia of the Dead’, reminds us of that.
This great encyclopedia is housed, we are told, in the Royal Library in Stockholm. Its many volumes contain complete biographies of everyone who ever lived. There is only one qualification for entry: nobody gets in who is featured in any other reference book. It is a memorial for those without memorials. A woman looks up her father’s entry; the plain details of an ordinary life, meals eaten, hobbies, work, final diagnosis, are very moving.
And then the woman wakes; it was a dream. Yet in the dream she had made a drawing; awake she recreates it, and the drawing exactly resembles the fatal cancer that killed her father. This fusion of book, dream, and the world irresistibly recalls the fiction of Borges; but Mr Kis is more haunted, less antic than the Argentine master, and his notes contain fewer jokes.
In his notes, Mr Kis introduces a further twist: he tells us that the encyclopedia might not be real, but the dream was – dreamed by a certain M., ‘to whom the story is dedicated’. And he tells us that if the encyclopedia does not exist yet, work on an analogue has begun, and ‘the Genealogical Society of the Church of the Latter Day Saints’ is, at this present time, compiling just such a comprehensive reference book, filing away on microfilm details of everybody who ever lived, as far as can be researched, so that the Mormons can retrace their family trees and retroactively baptise their ancestors.
Truth is always stranger than fiction, because the human imagination is finite while the world is not, and Mr Kis seems to be ambivalent about making things up from scratch.
Indeed, he almost seems to apologise for the story, ‘Red Stamps With Lenin’s Picture’, because it is ‘pure fiction’, about a literary love affair. He quotes Nabokov sympathetically: ‘I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books or penning things that had not really happened in some way or other.’ Not for Mr Kis art for art’s sake, but for truth’s sake.
Everywhere in these stories the correspondence among what is real, what might be real, and the mediation of the written word between these conditions, reverberates on many levels. In the superb ‘Book of Kings and Fools’, Mr Kis investigates the morality of the written word itself.
In this story, the central character is itself a book, titled ‘The Conspiracy, or The Roots of the Disintegration of European Society’. We are told that the existence of the book was first hinted at as a rumour in an article in a St Petersburg newspaper in 1906, the time of the Jewish pogroms. This rumour concerned a document ‘demonstrating the existence of a worldwide conspiracy against Christianity, the Tsar and the status quo’.
No sooner is it rumoured than the book appears, incorporated into a hysterical text by a fanatically mystic Orthodox priest. (And here I may have glimpsed one, only one, possible glitch in what reads like a seamlessly perfect translation by Michael Henry Heim: ‘The local Red Cross Chapter volunteered to publish this book’, it says here. But I can’t see the International Red Cross doing any such thing. Perhaps the culprits were the Rosicrucians?)
‘The Conspiracy’, as the book is called, offers universal explanations, always popular. In Germany, it seeds the mind of ‘a then unknown (as yet unknown) amateur painter’. It makes a deep impression on ‘an anonymous Georgian seminary student who was yet to be heard from’. Soon it finds its way into the delirious paranoia of human practice. It is the obscene triumph of the anti-book – a forged text designed to destroy.
Mr Kis scrupulously instructs us as to the nature of the reality constructed by the book’s most zealous readers – the reality of the death camps, a reality beyond the power of the human mind easily to imagine.
In his essential postscript, Mr Kis tells us that his intention was ‘to summarize the true and fantastic – “unbelievably fantastic” – story of how The Protocols of the Elders of Zion came into existence’. The story began as an essay, but in researching the obscure history of that anti-Semitic forgery whose construction is one of the greatest of all crimes against humanity, there came a point where Mr Kis ‘started imagining the events as they might have happened’. Then he moved into fiction; the fable is no less powerful than fact.
Books don’t really have lives of their own. They are only as important as the ideas inside them. The book, as we know it, took shape with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century; it was the tool of the dissemination of humanism but can, just as easily, spread the antithesis of humanism. ‘In point of fact,’ says Danilo Kis, ‘sacred books, and the cannonized works of master thinkers, are like a snake’s venom: they are a source of morality and iniquity, grace and transgression.’ He is wise, grave, clever, and complex. His is a book on the side of the angels.
(1989)