Kis's 'Hourglass' and the poetics of possibility.
Writings on Danilo Kis's Hourglass often state that the novel is difficult and confusing but that everything will be made clear by a letter at its conclusion which was actually written by the author's father. In these words I hear the assumption that you and I are lazy yet compulsively orderly creatures: we hate to exert ourselves, so the author, like a maid, knew to tidy up for us. And because fantasy is believed to make us exceedingly nervous, we are offered the security blanket of authenticity, a real document.I wonder if those who offer clarity as a carrot to readers are the ones who consider ambiguity a stick. For I've learned from Keats and Wordsworth to cherish the floating feeling between dream and waking which is so full of inconclusiveness. I don't long for this state to pass; in fact, I've taken a tip from Emily Dickinson and found ways to extend its pleasures until it becomes an everyday occurrence. (Her ars poetica in verse begins "I dwell in Possibility-- / A fairer House than Prose--.") And I value Kis because the letter he offers at the end of Hourglass doesn't clear up the mystery he created in the rest of his novel but is just as speculative, unreliable, and literary. It recapitulates in a condensed form what the reader has already heard--you could say it's more like the final section of a fugue, when the voices come close together, than the last pages of a detective story.
In fact, Kis plays with the genre of the detective story to inform readers that he does not share its premises: its positivistic confidence in the existence of truth constructed from evidence. Kis's section titles like "A Witness Interrogated" and "Criminal Investigation" suggest that the author of the final letter, E. S. (Eduard Sam), a Jew, has been picked up by the police in 1942 in a section of Yugoslavia under the rule of Hungarian fascists. Apparently, he was there to try to get his pension restored when the house where he was staying suddenly collapsed. Now he seems to be suspected of participating in some sort of conspiracy. But E. S. is also a disturbed man who was released from a mental asylum as his wife's charge, and the site of some or all of these inquiries may well be his head. Indeed, it's hard to conceive of an actual time and place where an investigator would say, "Draft a newspaper story about the tragic fate of the letter writer had he turned down the shameful offer to have his wheat ground without authorization at the mill of a certain Rosenberg."(1) This peremptory order leads straight into the realm of possibility, to the creation of an imaginary document.
In case we readers need gentle reminding that a novel may be told in part or in its entirety from an unreliable point of view, Kis tips his hat to Gogol and Dostoevski, who used this device, with his section title "Notes of a Madman." Of course, we know that in literature the mad fools are often the seers, so E. S. gets some of the most insightful lines, like the one about "this crime story, in which there is not a single positive element, not a single solid fact" (148). It's a story, E. S. adds, that involves death and "some peril, some terrible existential catastrophe--of that, there can be no doubt" (148). In a book loaded with doubt, this certainty stands out and points, ominously, in the direction of the coming Holocaust. In a world in which the perception of everyday "reality" is problematic, only E. S.'s sense of impending doom is mysteriously secure. The cause of his fears, he insists, "clearly and unmistakably" is "lucidity" (151).
But perhaps E. S. is just speaking with emphatic rhetoric here to gain some measure of credibility. For if you look closely at the novel, as I did with a Serbian student and a Croatian student recently, you'll see that such truth claims form part of a set of tags that rate the probability or improbability of an observation. The text has been sprinkled liberally with expressions like "probably" and "most likely," "perhaps" "maybe," "apparently," and "it is hard to say." Kis also uses verbal constructions as markers of speculation, as in "The young woman, who may be the bride" (98). And sometimes two surmises are offered, accompanied by the word "or," which lends authority to neither of them. But my favorite device used by Kis to create indeterminacy is the listing of alternative metaphors, one right after the other, which emphasizes the inadequacy of each. Sometimes they fail to build one consistent image, and this "mistake" of mixed metaphors is employed by Kis for shock effect, I think, as some composers use "disharmonies" to announce the rejection of established norms and conventions. The insistent repetition of these devices is a way of drumming into the reader that a trustworthy historical account is an impossibility.
Even the title of the novel, Hourglass, refers to an irresolvable perceptual problem: a vase or hourglass or chalice (the narrator, characteristically, won't decide among the three) is interpreted by the mind or will (again the narrator wavers) as two profiles looking at each other in a mirror. Is the hourglass an illusion, or is the mirror? This old optical trick--which is reproduced in graphic form early in the novel so you "get the picture"--hints that this author likes games and puzzles, preferably those which lack one right answer. Because of this playfulness, Hourglass stands out from most literature about the Holocaust. Along with the predictable anger and lamentations, it offers surprising and engaging riddles that may overcome resistance to a depressing theme.
An old schoolmate of Kis's in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Belgrade, Tomislav Blazev, directed me to one likely source of Kis's play with possibilities: Raymond Queneau's book Exercises in Style. In this literary experiment, which Kis translated into Serbo-Croatian, Queneau relates the same short anecdote again and again, and each retelling takes a different guiding principle: a rhetorical figure, a stylistic level, a poetic genre, a word field, etc. The chapters most relevant to Hourglass, I think, are the ones entitled "Hesitations," in which Queneau lists alternative interpretations of a scene, and "Ignorance," which is based on the question-and-answer formula. But while Queneau's dazzling parodies ultimately seem as tiresome and jejune as Czerny's piano exercises, for all they reveal is a writer's command of his craft, Kis makes his verbal skills serve a philosophical end.
His implicit attack in Hourglass is directed against old-fashioned positivists with their naive faith that a coherent, logical history can be built from documents and facts. The story of E. S. is so suffused with uncertainty that it can only be told as a series of guesses. Maybe his death can be laid at the door of his grasping relatives, who wouldn't care for him and his family. Maybe he sacrificed himself to spare his non-Jewish wife and child. Maybe the police considered all Jews potential if not actual conspirators. Maybe chance caused a rat to eat away at the foundations of the house where he was staying. Yet since E. S. rejected the idea of chance and believed in causality, he was condemned to search for a responsible party. His philosophical position is inseparable from his psychological condition, for he finds so much guilt, shared by so many, that he raves. But to write him off as paranoid would be to deny his insights into the way petty, rather ordinary actions mount up to monumental horror.
By constructing his novel around speculations and surmises rather than comforting pseudotruths, Kis expressed his confidence in us. And literary history suggests that readers generally rise to the expectations of a great writer sooner or (as in the reception of Emily Dickinson, for example) later. To put it another way, major writers eventually create their audiences by showing them how to appreciate certain devices, certain values. Twenty-two years after the initial publication of this novel in Serbo-Croatian in 1972 and over four years after the author's death in 1989, Kis's Hourglass is educating readers to live with indeterminacy. As I see it, the number of initiates is growing, and positivists are increasingly on the defensive. There is no reason to sell Kis with undeliverable promises of logical coherence to readers who can recognize that as an outdated fashion.(2)
NOTES
(1) Danilo Kis, Hourglass, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 62; hereafter cited parenthetically. (2) The author would like to thank Jane Bobko, Erin Kleindorfer, Isadora Laban, Helena Pugaric, and Vicky Weinmann for their help in the preparation of this article.
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| Author: | Rosenberg, Karen |
|---|---|
| Publication: | The Review of Contemporary Fiction |
| Geographic Code: | 4EXYU |
| Date: | Mar 22, 1994 |
| Words: | 1565 |
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