Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings Read online

  The most obvious immediate inspiration for this ‘plot’ is surely a certain Volume XLVI of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917), itself a ‘literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1902’, in which Bioy Cesares and Jorge Luis Borges discovered the first recorded reference to the land of Uqbar. But instead of, like Borges, writing a story about a fake reference book that invades the real world, Pavic has set to and compiled the book itself, a book that contains a whole lost world, with its heroes, its rituals, its deaths, its mysteries, and especially its theological disputations, providing a plausible-enough-sounding apparatus of scholarly references that involve a series of implicit jokes about theories of authenticity just as the skewed versions of characters such as Princess Ateh, recurring three times, involve implicit jokes about cultural relativity.

  Unless, of course, these aren’t jokes at all. Yugoslavia is a federation of states with extraordinarily diverse cultural histories that came together as a nation almost by accident in 1918, with a sizeable Moslem population, to boot. This idea of a tripartite version of an imaginary history ought to appeal to the British, since the United Kingdom is also a union of principalities with extraordinarily diverse cultural histories, and a significant Moslem minority, too.

  There is a blatant quality of fakery about the Dictionary. One imagines Pavic gleefully setting to with a Black and Decker drill, inserting artificial worm-holes into his synthetic oak beams. This fakery, this purposely antiqued and distressed surface, is what makes Pavic’s book look so post-modern as to be almost parodically fashionable, the perfect type of those Euro-bestsellers such as Patrick Suskind’s Perfume and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose that seem, to some British critics, to spring from an EEC conspiracy to thwart exports of genuine, wholesome, straight-forward British fiction the same way French farmers block the entry of English lamb. However, Yugoslavia is not a member of the Common Market and the British have developed a nervous tendency to label anything ‘post-modern’ that doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, and an end in that order.

  In Yugoslavia, according to Martin Seymour-Smith, ‘except for a few years after Tito came to power in 1945, Modernism has flourished almost, if not quite, as it wished’ (Guide to World Literature, edition of 1985). Dictionary of the Khazars fulfils, almost too richly, all Wallace Steven’s prescriptions in ‘Notes towards a Supreme Fiction’:

  it must be abstract

  it must change

  it must give pleasure.

  Most of the time, Pavic speaks in the language of romantic modernism – that is, surrealism. Al Bakri, the Spaniard, dies ‘dreaming of salty female breasts in a gravy of saliva and toothache’. The Princess Ateh composes a prayer: ‘On our ship, my father, the crew swarms like ants: I cleaned it this morning with my hair and they crawl up the clean mast and strip the green sails like sweet vine leaves into their anthills.’ A man, a certain Dr Ismail Suk, waking, blinks, ‘with eyes hairy as testicles’.

  Dr Suk is the hero of a section called ‘The Story of the Egg and the Violin Bow’ that boasts all the inscrutability of surrealist narrative plus a quality of what one can only call the ‘mercantile fantastic’ reminiscent of the short stories of Bruno Schulz, with their bizarre and ominous shops and shopkeepers. ‘The shop was empty except for a hen nestled in a cap in the corner. She cocked one eye at Dr Suk and saw everything edible in him.’ The Polish woman who will murder Dr Suk is called Dr Dorothea Schulz.

  In fact, there is a strong sense of pastiche everywhere, most engagingly in the collection of Islamic sources on the Khazar question, although the poem in question purports to have been written by the Khazar princess Ateh. It is a piece of spoof Kafka. A woman travelling to a distant school to take a test is subjected to bureaucratic misinformation and then told: ‘you can’t reach the school today. And that means not ever. Because the school will no longer exist as of tomorrow. You have missed your life’s destination . . .’

  But this is a revisionist version of Kafka. Once her destination is withheld from her, the traveller searches for the significance of her journey in the journey itself – and finds it in one luminous memory, of a table with food and wine. ‘On the table by the food a candle with a drop of flame on the top; next to it the Holy Book and the month of Jemaz-ul-Aker flowing through it.’ A happy ending!

  There is the casual acceptance of the marvellous common to both surrealism and the folktale: ‘Ibn Ashkany was himself a very deft player. There exists a written record of his fingering for a song, so we know that he used more than ten fingers to play his instruments.’ (In fact, Satan used this name for a time, and we learn how he played the lute with both his fingers and the tip of his tail.) A band of Greek merchants are ‘so hirsute that the hair on their chests had a part like the hair on their heads’.

  But the sense of the marvellous is most often created simply by the manipulation of language: ‘Avram Brankovich cuts a striking figure. He has a broad chest the size of a cage for large birds or a small beast.’ One way and another, the task of Pavic’s translator, Christina Privicevic-Zoric, must have been awesome, for among the Khazars we are living in a world of words as such. The vanished world of the Khazars is constructed solely out of words. A dictionary itself is a book in which words provide the plot. The Khazars are nothing if not people of the Book, dithering as they did between the three great faiths, the sacred texts of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. One of the copies of the 1691 edition of the Dictionary, we are told, was printed with a poisoned ink: ‘The reader would die on the ninth page at the words Verbum caro factum est. (“The Word became Flesh.”)’ Almost certainly, something metaphysical is going on.

  The Khazars indefatigably enter that most metaphysical of states, dreaming. ‘A woman was sitting by her fire, her kettle of broth babbling like bursting boils. Children were standing in line with their plates and dogs, waiting. She ladled out the broth to the children and animals and immediately Masudi knew that she was portioning out dreams from the kettle.’

  The Dream Hunters are a set of Khazar priests. ‘They could read other people’s dreams, live and make themselves at home in them . . .’ That is the Christian version. The Moslem Dictionary is more forthcoming: ‘If all human dreams could be assembled together, they would form a huge man, a human being the size of a continent. This would not be just any man, it would be Adam Ruhani, the heavenly Adam, man’s angel ancestor, of whom the imams speak.’

  The book of Hebrew sources is most explicit:

  The Khazars saw letters in people’s dreams, and in them they looked for primordial man, for Adam Cadmon, who was both man and woman and born before eternity. They believed that to every person belongs one letter of the alphabet, that each of these letters constitutes part of Adam Cadmon’s body on earth, and that these letters converge in people’s dreams and come to life in Adam’s body.

  (I am not sure that Pavic thinks of Freud when he thinks of dreams.)

  So we can construct our primal ancestor out of the elements of our dreams, out of the elements of the Dictionary, just as Propp thought that if one found sufficient narrative elements and combined them in the right order, one would be able to retell the very first story of all – ‘it would be possible to construct the archetype of the fairy tale not only schematically . . . but concretely as well.’

  Please do not run away with the idea that this is a difficult book, although it is flamboyantly and intentionally confusing. I first came across the Dictionary of the Khazars in the following manner. Last summer, on the beach of a rather down-market Italian resort, I was staying, for reasons I won’t bore you with, at the best hotel. Under a beach umbrella there was a wonderfully extrovert French businessman and his wife, who originally hailed from Yorkshire (‘I was passing through Paris thirty-five years ago and I’m still passing through’). He was recovering from a bypass operation; under the sun-tan oil his chest was ravelled. They first attracted my attention in the hotel restaurant because they ordered everything flambé. She, in
a white jump-suit printed with huge orange flowers, danced on the beach with my little boy. Meanwhile her husband was reading Dictionary of the Khazars. It had just been published in France, it was his holiday book. He kept reading bits aloud to her: ‘Kyr Avram is sometimes wont to say, “A woman without a behind is like a village without a church!”’ ‘I’m all right, then,’ she said. He was laughing so much I feared for his scars. At dinner, they read bits to the waiter as he flambéd their steaks.

  I thought that if this wonderful man and woman were enjoying the book so much, then so would I. In fact, perhaps the best way of tackling it is to read bits aloud, to treat it like a game. In his New York Times review, Coover suggested that, if marketed as a board game, it might soon outsell ‘Dungeons and Dragons’, which is probably true. It is a book to play with, to open up and take things out of, a box of delights and a box of tricks. It is a novel without any sense of closure, the product of a vast generosity of the imagination – user-friendly, you could say, and an invitation to invent for yourself.

  The book, by the way, comes in two editions, a male one and a female one, differing by 17 lines, perhaps because the scribe, Father Theoctist Nikolsky, avers that ‘masculine and feminine stories cannot have the same ending.’ Why not? But the gender difference between the editions is not crucial, in spite of the warning on the jacket, although the very concept is the only point in the book where Pavic’s invention nearly founders under an access of sheer cuteness.

  (1989)

  • 2 •

  Milorad Pavic: Landscape Painted with Tea

  Central to the argument of this frisky but intellectually gripping work of fiction is the idea of two oppositional human types – the idiorrhythmics, who are solitaries, each moving to his own rhythm of life, unique, separate; and the cenobites, the solidaries, who join in brotherhood and live in common. And a person must be either the one or the other. Never both.

  This is a classic either/or situation. Obviously, you can’t be both existentially alone and warmly part of a fraternity at the same time. ‘A man with a heart full of silence and a man with a heart full of quiet cannot be alike,’ opines the narrator of Landscape Painted with Tea in one of the frequent aphorisms that adorn the text. The book twists and turns about this contradiction and various resolutions to it.

  Although Landscape Painted with Tea is narrated in the third person from a traditionally omiscient and god-like point of view, the novel is constructed to let its reader in on the action at every opportunity, by a variety of means. If the text is a constant, then the ways of reading it are not. Pavic’s reader is invited, via the formal device of a crossword puzzle and its clues, to read the book ‘not in order of succession and across (as the river flows) but down, as the rain falls’.

  This produces an effect of intentional randomness not unlike that of some of Calvino’s writing – like that of the marvellous Castle of Crossed Destinies, for example, which based its constellation of stories on the various ways in which the cards in the Tarot pack fell. But Pavic isn’t interested in a new way of writing. He is interested in a new way of reading, because ‘any new way of reading that goes against the matrix of time, which pulls us towards death, is a futile but honest effort to resist this inexorability of one’s fate’.

  The traditional novel, like the traditional anecdote, begins and goes on until it ends. Like life. Pavic wants more than that. He wants to disrupt time, to challenge death.

  And why not, dammit. It’s filthy work but somebody’s got to do it. Kingsley Amis isn’t going to try.

  Pavic sets out to seduce the reader into the text. There is even a blank page at the end of the book where the reader can write out the denouement he or she has worked out by themselves. Pavic veers crazily between a particularly Balkan brand of cute surrealism (‘I hear the birds’ voices knitting endless socks and gloves with a thousand fingers’) and the kind of high seriousness that can concern itself with the nature of narrative, with what it is and what it does. Sometimes, in his concern to massage the reader pleasurably into a rapt contemplation of what constitutes the act of reading, he can come a cropper. Most of the time, though, he contrives to discuss this question and also give pleasure, no mean feat.

  You can’t be an idiorrhythmic and a cenobite at the same time, but you can change over from one to the other. Think of Yoan Siropoulos; he was born and died a Greek but, in between, ‘entered a different time, where different waters flowed’, in which he became Yovan Siropulov, the Bulgarian. His story is a miniature version of the bizarre epic of the lives of the book’s major figure, the Yugoslav architect, Atanas Svilar, who converts himself into the Russian mathematician, Atanas Fyodorovish Razin, and, after numerous adventures, emigrates to the USA.

  There seems to be a complicated political sub-text going on beneath the rich palimpsest of stories and counter-stories that provide the material for Pavic’s crossword clues. The architect, Svilar/Razin draws, again and again, the plans of the grand summer villa of Josip Broz Tito, ‘general secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party and president of the republic’, finally building himself a replica of this palace in the USA. Since irony is Pavic’s medium, it is hard for the non-Yugoslav reader to tell precisely what is going on, here. The central dichotomy between the idiorrhythmics and the cenobites has, of course, its own political resonance.

  You need to take Landscape Painted with Tea slowly. You need to chew it for a long time, like certain kinds of peasant bread. It will reward you with constant shocks of pleasure. There is its pervasive lyricism: ‘the moonlight . . . was the kind you enter from the dark, like a room . . .’ The aphorisms are frequent, always witty, sometimes with witty little teeth: ‘Nobody can be masculine every day, not even God.’ There are incidental stories whose characters have the radiant two-dimensionality of fairytale, like the man who wears two wrist-watches and tells his lover: ‘This silver watch measures your time and this gold one mine. I wear them together, so that I can always know what time you have.’

  It is the architect Razin who paints the landscapes in various kinds of tea, fruit teas, tisanes, Darjeeling (the champagne of teas), green tea, every shade and variation of colour executed in tea. But very early on in the book, a traveller recounts how he became a painter by accident after his wife ‘wrote her signature in the snow, steering his penis like a fountain pen, and for a while the signature steamed like tea, and then became perfectly legible’. (Soon she was drawing pictures using the same method.) Landscapes Painted with Pee? Would this be a joke in Serbo-Croat?

  (1991)

  • 3 •

  Irish Folk Tales, Arab Folktales

  Thomas Gray surely did not mean to be patronising when he referred to the ‘mute, inglorious Milton’ who might have been slumbering in the country churchyard. But if he indeed meant ‘mute’ metaphorically rather than physically, then it is difficult to imagine even an illiterate Milton refraining from discourse. Surely a ploughboy Milton would have made a lot of noise; and even if only other members of the rural proletariat heard him, that does not mean he would have been silent.

  Few poets have been so intellectually well-armed as the real Milton, yet the antique glamour of the blind singer still clings to him, so that one thinks of him in the same breath as Homer, who, according to tradition, was also blind, and created epics too, and yet was almost certainly not illiterate but simply pre-literate – that is, could not have been literate even had he wished to be so. Language exists before its own written form. The voice is the first instrument of literature; narrative precedes text.

  These first two plump handsome volumes in the projected Penguin Folklore Library transform oral narrative into texts, so that the tales will survive the voices of their narrators. Inea Bushnaq notes: ‘It is a wistful moment when interest in recording an oral tradition wakens.’ It means that the culture of the illiterate, that is, the poor, is no longer being taken for granted. Sometimes it means that it has started to die. As the voices fall silent, one by one, so we lose irrepla
ceable parts of our past.

  Robert Darnton, the historian, says (in his essay, ‘Peasants Tell Tales: the Meaning of Mother Goose’) that folktales ‘provide a rare opportunity to make contact with the illiterate masses who have disappeared into the past without leaving a trace.’ This is rather an apocalyptic way of putting it. We may not know much about the lives of those ‘illiterate masses’ but most of us are directly descended from them, and we retain, if we have lost everything else from the oral tradition, a complicated folklore of family.

  Besides, a flourishing illiterate culture has always wonderfully nourished the productions of the literati. Henry Glassie reminds us in his introduction to Irish Folk Tales that James Joyce named Finnegans Wake after a Dublin street song, even borrowed the plot.

  But Ireland is a special case. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory went out on purpose to listen to country storytellers, to strive consciously to reach out to those who had slipped through the huge holes in the net of history down which the common people vanish – to reconstruct from the mouths of the poor the basis for an authentically Irish literature, a project that bore abundant fruit. (It is interesting to read, in Inea Bushnaq’s book, that there is ‘a lively folklore department in the university at Bir Zeit,’ on the debated West Bank, and an increasing interest is the collection and preservation of Palestinian culture.)