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Abracadabra, à la Khazar!
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14677 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1988 |
2,912 Words |
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Predrag Palavestra
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Milorad Pavić, a literary historian at the University of Belgrade, has used the motif of the disappearance of a nation from the historic scene as the foundation for his unusual pseudo-historic novel, Dictionary of the Khazars. Combining serious research on the story of Khazarian extinction with ironic and fantastic stories, Pavić is among the first contemporary Yugoslav authors to use the erudite style of postmodernist deconstruction, pastiche, and a mixture of fiction and faction. Nevertheless, regardless of how paradoxical it might seem, Pavić remains primarily a historian, although he chooses to present historical experience as part of a fantasy in which that experience is turned upside down, inside out, and translated into a nightmarish whirlpool of phantasmagoric miracles, such as can be experienced only on the far side of reason.
In so doing, Pavić is building upon the poetics of historical pastiche and historical mystification previously explored by Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco. By mixing science and imagination, he is able to surpass the pathos of poetical and critical realism, to challenge the seriousness of historic truths and, with the impertinent skill of an illusionist and magician to design the emperor's new clothes.
Pavić's stories ("A Sneezing Icon," "A Job Performed Too Well") represent the highest level of accomplishment in Serbian fantastic prose. His A Small Night Novel—predicated on the idea that all people in the world are divided into anchorites and cenobites (like the monks of Athos)—followed the line of gradual metamorphosis of the literary telos.
The Dictionary of the Khazars shows the outer limits of stylistic fireworks and narrative illusion-making. With an easy touch of hand, with a magician's skill, and enjoying pulling the reader's leg to the full, Pavić utilizes all the advantages of his literary erudition in a way that is ever more successfully being used by scientists, professors, and other intellectual writers. Such writers are sure that by playing with daydreams and by arranging the magic dice, they can open a door to numerous civilized alternatives to the pressures of modernity. Hemmed in by threats and ideologies, witnesses to violence upon reason and conscience, and surrounded by mad and irresponsible politics that penetrate everyone's home and every corner of life, contemporary intellectuals do not shed their responsibility for the future but try to broaden their selection: the inner spiritual space filled with fruits of fantasy and reason, where the infinite world of ideas and possibilities are conceived and reproduced.
In that inner space, logical paradoxes fuse together; forms are deconstructed and dispersed in particles. History can be reversed and read backward, contrary to the course of legalized, historical lies and illusions. The unnatural and the unreal become the new truth, being reaffirmed daily by science, which has already stepped into the unbelievable world of fantasy. Cruel and unimaginable paradoxes of real life are being transformed into a new synthetic texture of literature that questions itself from within. Both resistance to reality and service to ideologies can disintegrate the conventional perception of literature. This idea is gradually being lost to the cruel bind between ethical pressures and moral destruction and is slowly getting closer to a black hole in which it will either disappear forever or be reborn.
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