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Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian

Studies, Volume 22, Number 1, 2008, pp. 1-15 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/ser.2011.0017

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ser/summary/v022/22.1.holt.html

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Enlisting Words Against Words:

Danilo Kis Enumeration
Katharine Holt
Columbia University

Danilo Ki was a list-maker.

His 1969 story The Meadow, in Autumn describes an old circus ground
with a thirteen-item list of abandoned remnants.1 His 1983 story To Die for
Ones Country is Glorious includes a six-item catalogue of everything that
stood on the side of life for a condemned man.2 And his 1982 essay Paris,
the Great Kitchen of Ideas presents a twenty-two-item Rabelaisian or
Borgesian enumeration of all that Ki does and does not like about the city.3
Indeed, it is possible to find a list of some noticeable length in virtually every
one of Kis texts. The device is so frequently and strikingly employed that
Aleksandar Hemon could refer blithely, in his introduction to Garden, Ashes,
to Ki, ever a master of lists.4
And yet, despite Kis obvious and sustained interest in lists, his experiments with them have not received serious attention from critics, most likely
because he was asked in a 1985 interview about the importance of enumeration as a device, and his response has been taken as the final word on the
subject.5 I quote it in full:

Danilo Ki, The Meadow, in Autumn, in Early Sorrows (For Children and Sensitive
Readers), trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: New Directions, 1998), 43.
2
Danilo Ki, To Die for Ones Country is Glorious, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1989), 129.
3
Danilo Ki, Paris, The Kitchen of Ideas, trans. Paul Milan Foster, Review of Contemporary
Fiction 14, no. 1 (1994): 13335.
4
Aleksandar Hemon, Introduction, in Danilo Ki, Garden, Ashes, trasn. William J.
Hannaher, with an introduction by Aleksandar Hemon (Champagne, IL: Dalkey Archive Press,
2003), vii.
5
As Ivana Vuleti has argued, current Ki criticism tends to accept the writers own views,
regarding him as the best critic of his own fiction. Ivana Vuleti, The Prose Fiction of Danilo
Ki, Serbian Jewish Writer: Childhood and the Holocaust (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press,
2003), 37.
Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 22(1): 115, 2008.

Katherine Holt

Enumeration is primarily the reduction of objects to the spitting image of the world. Naming is creating.
Ive always been fascinated by the diversity of things. Long ago I
wrote a poem that was nothing but a detailed inventory of the contents of a trash can, the rsum of a world, the simplest of rsums.
The remains of any object conceal a story, and more often than not I
prefer naming objects to telling their story: the trash can has its archaeological layers.
Reading the Bible, Homer, or Rabelais, I keep finding devices engendered by the disparity and incongruity of objects in chance encounter. If I hadnt been amazed by the same sort of jumble as a
child, I dont think Id have been able to recognize enumeration as a
literary device; without the autobiographical underpinning, I might
have dismissed it as an arbitrary game.
The trash can, like the cemetery, is a great repository of the
world, its very essence. Random juxtaposition makes for strange and
wonderful combinations. As in Lautramonts formula. 6
Following Kis statement, we might assume that his lists, when they appear in his artistic work, confidently name and create new worlds, providing
strange and wonderful combinations that amaze the reader. But this is not,
in fact, the case. For while Ki suggests that his lists celebrate the diversity of
the world, they actually do something quite different. They: 1) serve as protests against totalizing worldviews, including the kind of positivism that enabled his fathers death at the hands of the Nazis; and 2) serve as warnings
about the totalitarian quality of the word as such, suggesting that the process
of inscription itself is tainted by violence. And this is a crucial point, for it
allows us to better understand Kis poetics. It emphasizes that Ki is not
merely interested in celebrating the objects of chance encounter, but is
committed to protecting such objectsand their human counterpointsfrom
abuse. It reminds us, moreover, that everywhere in his oeuvre Ki is actively
engaged with ethical questions such as whether, after the Holocaust, poetry
could ever again be free of violence.7
6

Danilo Ki, Homo Poeticus, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995),
20809.
7
A number of critics have suggested that Kis primary ethical concern is whether poetry
should be written after the Holocaust, spotting a connection to Adornos formulation. If Adorno
was preoccupied with whether poetry should be written after the Holocaust, Ki, I would
suggest, however, that Ki was more concerned with the potential dangers of language itself
than such a formulation would allow.

Enlisting Words Against Words

To understand the stakes of Kis lists and their role in his ethics and
aesthetics, we must turn to his four most prominent lists: the one in the 1966
poem Garbage Heap (from papers left behind), alluded to in the statement
on enumeration quoted above, and the three lists most privileged in Kis
prose, the list of disciplines in the novel Garden, Ashes (1965), the list of acquaintances in the novel Hourglass (1972), and the list of everything in the
short story The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1983).8
Listing Against Boundaries: The Garbage Heap (from Papers Left Behind)

We begin with Kis 1966 poem because, at least at first glance, it appears to
function according to Kis statement on enumeration, randomly juxtaposing
elements to draw attention to the general diversity of things. Upon closer
inspection, however, it becomes clear that the poems list functions not as a
repository of the world as such, but as a repository against unnamed, but implied, threats. It thus has a more explicit socio-political function than his
statement on enumeration would imply.
In the poem, detritus becomes the center of the aesthetic, and the reader is
encouraged to see the found objects presented in the poem as typical of garbage that could be in any trash can. The poem opens, for instance, with a
catalogue of bodily waste products:
8

In reading this set of texts together, I am diverging from the path trod by most Ki critics,
who group Garden, Ashes and Hourglass with the short story cycle Early Sorrows (1969) and
treat those works together as family trilogy. These critics take the approach endorsed by Ki
himself, who began referring to Early Sorrows, Garden, Ashes, and Hourglass as a triptych
in 1986, while he was working on another autobiographical project, a book in dialogue form
entitled Life, Literature. Perhaps, as Ivana Vuleti has argued, Ki began binding his earlier
works so tightly into a cycle because his work on his first straightforward autobiography
brought back his most intensely remembered experiences and imposed on Ki a more unified
(and also more conventional) view of his trilogy (Vuleti, 33). Certainly, since Kis
pronouncements about the texts relationship to one another, most critics have followed his lead
and addressed the body of work as a unit, with each of the three works taking a slightly
different approach on the same events: Early Sorrows presenting the perspective of a child,
Garden, Ashes mixing a child and an adult writers points of views, and Hourglass taking a
more objective, multi-perspectival approach.
While it is true that each of these three texts is loosely based on Kis own family
memories, the three texts that make up the so-called family cycle are actually father apart
thematically and formally than the three prose texts I am approaching, which all thematize the
same problem: how lists (and, by extension, all words) are corrupted by the violence done to
others. Like Garden, Ashes and Hourglass (and unlike Early Sorrows), The Encyclopedia of
the Dead is explicitly concerned with what happens to narrative in the face of a father figure
who has disappeared, been threatened, or recently died. These three works could be said to
constitute their own, family narrative trilogy.

Katherine Holt

Human and animal refuse: fingernails, hairs

Womens hair which crackles to the electric touch
Micas of calluses cut by a razor blade
Dark-brown lichens of wounds
Hair from legs nose ears
A fragrant moss of womens armpits9
As the poem progresses, it moves from this collage of the everydaya
subject of poetry Ki understands to be non-traditional, the poems aggressive
opening suggestsand ends with a meta-poetic meditation on the proper
subject of poetry, still in the form of a list:
Lilac clusters that disintegrate magnificently like a removed
lung of a smoker
Rags
elastics collars
Roses
roses which suit a garbage heap fine as they do poems
roses beginning to smell like people
roses on which flies descend
roses wrapped in thin rustling paper by salesgirls moist hands
roses kept in crystal vases like golden fish
roses whose water was changed like compresses on patients heads
roses bound with wire like criminals
roses with joints similar to hoofed mammals joints
roses whose leaves look very much artificial
roses because of which I woke up at 3:30 A.M. so as not to forget
them tomorrow.10
In giving the poem this shape, Ki implies that there is poetry in every alley in
the world, even if our eyes are not always open to it, and that writing about
such things is valid, if not an ethical obligation for the writer.
Despite the ending of the poem, which is clearly centered around an idea
of how poetry should function, Kis main principle of organization here
seems to be what William H. Gass has called the principle of things simply
come upon, either the way they are remembered, as a guest list may be composed, or as found, for instance, when the police inventory your pockets be-

9
Danilo Ki, Garbage Heap (from papers left behind), trans. Vasa D. Mihailovich, Review of
Contemporary Fiction 14 , no.1 (Spring 1994): 124.
10
Ibid., 127.

Enlisting Words Against Words

fore putting you away.11 In this sense, Ki seems to be functioning as a practitioner of found art or collage, as a kind of assemblagist akin to Joseph
Cornell. The temptation to compare Ki to a visual artist is explained by a key
facet of his aesthetic, which is shared with other list-makers. As Valentina
Izmirlieva has emphasized, in its attention to visibles a list resembles an
exhibition, a parade, or any other project of serial display that engenders a
Borgesian imagination and a Foucauldian critique: the Museum, the Library,
the Encyclopedia.12 Indeed, on one level, at least, Ki seems to be functioning like the great enumerator Chaucer, who, in Stephen A. Barneys reading,
emphasizes the visualness of the visibles (horata) in his lists and provides
ocular proof for his reader by presenting, rather than representing his
objects.13
And yet, in Garbage Heap (from papers left behind), I would argue that
Ki is doing more than just delighting in strange and wonderful combinations, simulating the discovery of the world, or leading a museum tour of
objects found along the way of life. Ki is also taking a political stance by
treating all of his subjects equally in the poem, elevating human waste products to the level of roses and dragging roses down into the dump. In effect he
defends his objects from the imposition of boundaries between types of subjects for a poem. Equivalence may be, as Izmirlieva and Barney have argued,
the basic building block of a list.14 But I would suggest that in Kis poem it is
a weapon against the dangers of classification and even, perhaps, against the
kind of socio-economic boundaries identified by the Norwegian social
anthropologist Fredrik Barth.15 For Ki seems to be constructing his list
11

William H. Gass, And, in Habitations of the Word (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1985), 175.
12
Valentina Izmirlieva, All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mysticism, and Magic (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2008), 55.
13
Stephen A. Barney, Chaucers Lists, The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English
Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Larry D. Benson and Seigfried Wenzel
(Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 1982), 20105.
14
Izmirlieva, 54; Barney, 19094.
15
Barths 1969 essay collection Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of
Culture Difference helped shift the discussion of ethnic groups as systems of culture to ethnic
groups as exclusive entities dependent on the maintenance of the boundary. Relevant to our
discussion is Barths interest not in the cultural stuff enclosed by an ethnic group, but the
ethnic boundary that defines the group. (Fredrik Barth, Introduction, Ethnic Groups and
Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 1998),
14, emphasis his.) I do not mean to imply that Ki is explicitly commenting here on the
Holocaust or the boundaries between any specific cultural groups (say, Hungarian Jews and
non-Hungarian Jews). But I would suggest that Kis poem challenges the importance of
classification systems and of social boundaries of the sort identified by Barth.

Katherine Holt

against those that confidently stratify information, objects, andwe can extrapolatepopulations. This socio-political dimension of Kis listing may
only be implicit in Garbage Heap (from papers left behind), but it is much
clearer in the remaining three lists we shall examine.
Listing Against Positivism: Garden, Ashes

The central list in the novel Garden, Ashes announces itself loudly and puts
the narrative on pause for a page and a half, as we read the 217 disciplines
that the narrators father, Eduard Scham, used to revise the third edition of his
catch-all manuscript, the Bus, Ship, Rail, and Air Travel Guide. This mammoth list takes up more space than the next-longest one, which includes
thirty-eight items, and dwarfs most of the novels lists. Typical of the text are
the descriptions of: substances caked on a tray (coffee grounds, cod-liver oil,
honey, sherbet); the flowers a woman surrounded herself with (pink carnations, hyacinths, lilacs, irises, hundreds of white lilies); and what the narrators father points at (a flaming finger at silk, draperies, tapestries, and chandeliers.)16 There are slightly longer lists in the text, such as the twelve-item
list of items in a room that began to move in the narrators head:
my bed, my mother and I, the flower vase, the marble-topped nightstand and the glass of water, my fathers cigarettes, the angel that
watches over children, my mothers Singer sewing machine, the night
lamp, the dressers and curtains, the whole room.17
But there are very few lists made up of over ten items, let alone 217 items as
in the jarringly long list to which I have already alluded.
As if its length were not enough to mark it in the text, it is also the only
list that is alphabetized. I quote the list in full:
alchemical studies, studies in autobiography, cabalistic studies,
Cartesian studies, cartographic, cataleptic, cataplectic, causalistic,
casuistic, characterological studies, studies in chiromancy, comedic
studies, comparativistic, Confucian, constitutionalistic, cosmic, cosmogonic, cosmographic, cosmological, cynological, Darwinistic, deistic, dialectical studies, studies in dichotomy, diathetic studies, diluvial, diplomatic, dualistic, dynamic, eclectic, ecliptic, ecological,
16

Danilo Ki, Garden, Ashes, trans. William J. Hannaher (Champagne, IL: Dalkey Archive
Press, 2003), 3, 6, 51.
17
Ibid., 16.

Enlisting Words Against Words

economic, embolismic, embryological, emotionalistic, empirical

studies, studies in empirical criticism, studies in empirical monism,
empiricist studies, encyclopedic, endemic, entomological, Epicurean,
epizootic, equilibristic, erotic, eschatological, esoteric, Esperantist,
essentialist, esthetic, ethical, ethnic, ethnographic, ethnological, etiological, etymological, euphonic, eugenic, evangelistic, evolutionist,
exact, exorcistic, ecosmotic, fatalistic, fetishistic, financial studies,
studies of florilegia, folkloric studies, formalistic, Freudian, genealogical, genetic, geocentric, geodetic studies, studies in geognosy,
geographic studies, geological, geometrical, geophysical, geopolitical,
geothermic, geotropic, Germanic studies, studies in glaciology, studies in gnosiology, Gnostic studies, grammatical, harmonic, Hegelian,
heliocentric, Hellenistic, hemotherapeutic, Herculean, heterosexual
studies, studies in Hinduism, historical studies, humanistic, hydraulic
studies, studies in hydraulic engineering, hydrodynamic studies, hydrographic, hypnotic, hypological, iconoclastic, iconographic studies,
studies in iconolatry, idealistic studies, ideographic, illusionist, indeterministic, individualistic, intuitionist, irrationalistic studies, studies
in Judeophobia, juridical studies, Lamarckian, lexicographical, lexicological, literary, Machist, magical, magnetic, martyrological,
Marxist, Masonic, materialistic studies, studies in mechanical therapy,
medieval studies, Mephistophelian, mercantilist, metamorphic studies, studies in metempsychosis, microbiological studies, mineralogical, monotheistic, moral, morphological, musicological, mystical,
mythological, navigational, neo-Kantian, normative, numismatic, objectvistic, onomastic, optical, oratorical studies, studies in organography, orometric studies, osmological, paleographic, paleontological,
paleophytological, pantheistic, parasitological, particularistic studies,
studies of pedigrees, phantasmagoric studies, phantasmic, pharisaical,
phonological, phenomenological, philological, phylogenetic, physical,
physiognomical, pietistic, Platonist, pluralistic, political, polymorphic, quietist, scholastic studies, studies in Socratic dialogue, semasiological studies, sensualistic studies, studies in skepticism, sociological studies, solipsistic, sophistic, spiritualistic studies, studies in
Stoicism, supranaturalistic studies, Taoist, tautological, technical,
tectonic, telepathic, theological, thermodynamic, topographical, toponymic, toxicological studies, studies in unanism, uranographic studies, studies in urbanism, urological studies, utopistic, venereological

Katherine Holt

studies, studies in versification, voluntaristic studies, vulcanological,

Zionist, zoogeographical, zoographic, zoological studies.18
This list has been dismissed by Ivana Vuleti as mere irony, a piece of
playful exuberance that would crumble if subjected to closer scrutiny.19 And
she has suggested that to look for any precise meaning conveyed by the list,
apart from what it tells us about Eduard Schams mental condition (including
the quasi-encyclopedic ambitions which are clearly a part of it), would merely
be to reproduce the same unfortunate ambitions in another field.20 While
Vuleti is right to identify the quasi-encyclopedic ambitions that are a part of
Eduard Schams approach to the world generally and to his text specifically,
to dismiss this list as a dead end is to miss a critical dimension of Kis artistic
project. For the lists main effect is not to cast doubt on Eduard Scham, but to
raise epistemological questions. Ki reaches beyond proving Eduard Schams
insanity, in other words, and takes up the problem of rationally grounded
knowledge per se, suggesting that Schams positivistic project, like the list
describing his methods, is doomed to be incomplete, since it is impossible to
perfectly know the world. Moreover, Ki suggests here, Schams project is
not even desirable, since attempts to classify and inventory the world are
tainted, in Garden, Ashes, by the science that condemns the Jew Eduard
Scham to death.
To suggest that Garden, Ashes wrestles with the effect of Eduard Schams
death on his son Andiand with the legacy of Kis own father, who died in
Auschwitzis hardly groundbreaking. It is standard for Ki criticism and,
indeed, is demanded from the text, which sets up the expectation for an
autobiography or first-person Bildungsroman, but ultimately dissolves into a
meditation on the narrators lost father and the effect the loss has had on the
narrators artistic consciousness. But the specter of Eduard Schams
victimhood is critical to a correct understanding of Kiss mammoth list, for it
reminds us that in Garden, Ashes there is no room for mere irony and that
any expressions of exuberance are explicitly grounded in historical
circumstances.
To put it in the language of the narrator, in this text Andis
embellishment machine operates under strict restraints. Andi himself
recognizes this fact, asking in the end of the narrative, as he contemplates
what has happened to the routine, material objects:

18

Danilo Ki, Garden, Ashes, 3839.

Vuleti, The Prose Fiction of Danilo Ki, 68.
20
Ibid., 68.
19

Enlisting Words Against Words

Where have the glittering picture frames gone from these pages, the
violet-painted fiacres, the flowers that wither in their vases? Where
have the trains gone, and the hanging baskets that sway on the
platforms of provincial railway stations? Where is the bluish light
from the first-class train compartments? Where is the lace that flutters
like a fan on the green plush seats? Is it possible that the
embellishment machine, the crystal vessel through which the current
passes in the electroplating process, has come to a halt so soon?
Where is the gilt of the antique picture frames, or the smile of the
Mona Lisa?21
The embellishment machine that earlier allowed Andi to pepper his
descriptions with the gilt of antique picture frames and an illustration of his
mothers Singer sewing machine,22 has now come to a halt, apparently
because Andis father has disappeared, having fallen victim to a Nazi
machine quite different from the embellishing one. With his father gone,
there is no center to Andis world. Ever since my father vanished, he writes,
everything has come loose, fallen apart.23
As in Andis world, in the world of Garden, Ashes there is no room for
embellishment as suchor for lists that are displays of mere irony,
random juxtaposition, or a confident attempt to know the world. For both
Andi and Ki are haunted by tragedy, and Eduard Schams project is doomed
by his religious background and the philosophical connection between his
positivism and the Nazis. This 217-item list is not an exuberant celebration of
the world, but a grim reminder that neither verbal play nor positivism can be
innocent any longer.
Listing Against Suffering: Hourglass

Like Garden, Ashes, Hourglass is full of lists. Their use is not the most
obvious formal device in the book; that would be the changing points of view,
which are highlighted by the novels title and prologue, and the interweaving
of different manuscripts (Travel Scenes, Criminal Investigation, Notes
of a Madman, and A Witness Interrogated). But lists are everywhere, in all
the different sections, whether the narrator is E.S. (Eduard Scham) himself or
someone writing about him in the third person. There is one list, however, that

21

Ki, Garden, Ashes, 168.

Ibid., 25.
23
Ibid., 146.
22

10

Katherine Holt

eclipses the other lists in Hourglass, much as the list of disciplines in Garden,
Ashes far surpasses all the shorter lists in that novel.
The phenomenally long list in Hourglass appears in the section Criminal
Investigation (II), when the unidentified witness is asked which acquaintances E.S. and a Mr. Gavanski might have shared. The answer comprises one
paragraph spanning five pages in the novel, and is thus too long to quote in
full, but roughly the first fifth of it runs as follows:
What acquaintances had the two men in common?
Mr. Dragutin Floriani, court clerk, who in a game of simultaneous
chess against nine opponents (in 1924) had beaten the celebrated Otto
Titusz Blthy of Budapest; Mr. Richrd Engel, merchant and sufferer
from claustrophobia, who had thrown himself under the wheels of an
express train in 1938, leaving behind a widow and two daughters; Mr.
Tihomir Petrovi, an official at the Finance Ministry, who in 1920 or
thereabouts had returned from Paris with luxuriant black hair, claiming that a hormone treatment had restored not only his hair but his virility as well; Mr. Adrin Fehr, known as Fedya, whose intolerable
headaches had led him to hang himself three years before; Dr. Maxim
Freud, surgeon, who had been shot on January 24, 1942, and whose
brain, blown out of his skull, had lain all day in the wet snow on the
corner of Mileti Street and Greek School Street; one Sndor (surname unknown), who was able to drink three liters of red wine at one
swallow; Mr. Jovan Gondja, gravedigger, who was murdered in the
cemetery along with his child; Helmr Bla, the town knacker, with
whom the two friends had taken a drink now and then at Weinhebbels, near Catholic Gate, and who had recently sawed a woman in
two before throwing her into the Danube; A. Ziegler, merchant, who
had suffered a paralytic stroke; Mr. Bla Sternberg, railroad inspector,
who in December 1941 had thrown himself under a freight train at the
entrance to a tunnel, explaining in his farewell letter that he had been
driven to this step by the general chaos; Mr. Miksa Kohn, wholesaler, who had been shot along with his family (wife and three children); Mr. arko Uzelac, baker, whose mustache and ears had been
cut off, but who had survived.24
In theory, this is a catalogue of E.S. and Mr. Gavanskis acquaintances
and a mapping of their shared world, but the content of the list suggests that
there is another principle guiding it. The fact that so many of the individuals
24

Danilo Ki, Hourglass, trans. Ralph Manheim (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990), 7779.

Enlisting Words Against Words

11

named have been brutalized or have died at their own handsEngel threw
himself under a bridge, Fedya hung himself, Dr. Freud was shot, Gondja was
murdered, Sternberg had threw himself under a freight train, Kohn was shot
along with his familysuggests that it details the consequences of someones
hit list. Here, it seems, is a gallery of victimsone to which Ki is bearing
witness and drawing attention.
The subject matter alone is to keep this list from being a product of irony,
play, or a narratological desire to embellish and to give it a mark of political
protest. But there is also the context of the novel, which also includes lists that
are explicitly shaped by a totalitarian desire to know everything. These lists
appear in the A Witness Interrogated sections, in the first-person voice, as
the witness responds to increasingly aggressive demands for information.
Again and again in these sections, E.S. is asked for more information
about a given subject. In response, he provides a description that is deemed by
the narrator to be incomplete, which prompts him to expand his point into a
longer list. When E.S. mentions a vitrine that belongs to his friend Samuel
Mayer, for instance, the questioner asks, What else is there in the vitrine?25
E.S. answers with a description of a statue depicting Hermes and Pluto, and is
then immediately prompted a one-word command: Continue. Continue he
does, with a description of another statue, at which point he is once again instructed: Continue.
Indeed, the interrogator will not allow E.S. to rest until he has provided as
much information is possible at every moment in the question and answer session. When E.S. says that he used to manufacture brushes for masons, for
house painters, for artists, hairbrushes, and so on, the interrogator immediately snaps back, What do you mean by and so on? In turn, E.S. amends
his reply, adding: Steel brushes, scrubbing brushes, shaving brushes.26
Then, a few questions later, after E.S. has described all the masculine objects in another acquaintances apartment (an amber cigarette holder, a silver
snuff box, little things like that), the interrogator asks you havent left anything out? In answer, E.S. says, Some phylacteries, a Torah scroll, and
some utensils, which in turn prompts a question about the utensils.27 Let me
remind you that everything is important, the interrogator reminds E.S. soon
afterwards.28 Collecting information and trying to record a complete account of events takes on a darker and darker spin as E.S.s interrogator forces

25

Danilo Ki, Hourglass, 155.

Ibid., 158.
27
Ibid., 159.
28
Ibid., 161.
26

12

Katherine Holt

E.S. to provide more and more information, eventually forcing him to the
point where all he can say as a response to certain questions is Im tired.29
In the context of these cruel attempts to pin down E.S., no list in Hourglass is innocent or free from totalitarian connotations. In the face of this, the
mammoth list of acquaintances takes on special weight: it is not just a tribute
to those who have been victimized by history and its agents, but an act of
protest on their behalf, a reminder just how many suffer, like E.S., at the
hands of those, like E.S.s interrogator, who are trying to impose a totalized
vision on the world.
Listing Against Inscription: The Encyclopedia of the Dead

The jarringly long list in the title story of Kis 1983 collection The Encyclopedia of the Dead does not actually appear within the story, but is constantly
alluded to: it is the list-like The Encyclopedia of the Dead itself. This text,
which is discovered by the narrator in the Royal Library in Stockholm, is essentially one long list, recording everything about certain dead individuals.
The principles of its organization are made very clear by Ki. The text: 1) is
alphabetically arranged; 2) includes entries for only non-famous people who
are not referenced in any other encyclopedias; and 3) includes entries for only
people who lived after 1789, as the Encyclopedia came into being shortly after 1789. Ultimately, the story ends on a fantastic note and seems to have all
been a dream, a vision that allows the narrator to understand her fathers obsession with floral decoration as a manifestation of the cancer from which he
was suffering. For our purposes, however, it is not important whether or not
The Encyclopedia of the Dead is a realist text. It matters simply that in this
story, as in Garden, Ashes and Hourglass, Ki introduces a potentially complete list and then casts doubt upon it to emphasize both the impossibility of
capturing the world in words and the dangers of attempting to do so.
The Encyclopedia of the Dead centers on the tension between life and
narrative about it, charting the reactions of a young woman from Belgrade as
she makes sense of the impossibly long entry on her recently deceased father.
While reading the entry, the narrator repeatedly expresses amazement at the
comprehensiveness of the text. What makes the Encyclopedia unique, the
narrator notes, is the way it depicts human relationships, encounters, landscapesthe multitude of detail that make up a human life.30 A bit later, she
exclaims:
29

Danilo Ki, Hourglass, 201.

Danilo Ki, Encyclopedia of the Dead, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Evanston: Northwestern
UP, 1989), 42.

30

Enlisting Words Against Words

13

Nothing, as I have said, is lacking, nothing omitted, neither the condition of the road nor the hues of the sky, and the list of paterfamilias.
Markos worldly possessions is complete to the last detail. Nothing
has been forgotten, not even the names of the authors of old textbooks
and primers full of well-meaning advice, cautionary tales, and biblical
parables. Every period of life, every experience is recorded: every
fish caught, every page read, the name of every plant the boy ever
picked.31
Here and elsewhere, the narrator claims that the Encyclopedia is utterly
complete, gesturing, through incomplete lists, at its wide-ranging gaze. The
short sequence about authors of old textbooks and primers full of wellmeaning advice, cautionary tales, and biblical tales becomes shorthand for
everything, while every fish caught, every page read, the name of every
plant the boy ever picked becomes shorthand for every experience. The
narrators affirmation of completeness raises a specter of doubt in the reader.
What kind of book, we are left to ask, could possibly include all the details
that make up a human life? The answer, Ki suggests, is none, for no word or
list or encyclopedia can ever succeed at totalizing and capturing the world.
Indeed, Ki suggests, the word can never even do justice to the richness of
a most ordinary individual. Summarizing the Encyclopedias section on the
fathers youth, for instance, the narrator writes:
Passing over the things that my father would bring home and that the
Encyclopedia inventories with tender, loving care, I will mention only
an Orion radio set, the Collected Works of Maxim Gorky, an oleander
in an enormous wooden bucket, and a barrel for picking cabbage, as I
find them more important than the other trifles the book goes into,
such as the lined fabric I bought for him with my first wages and the
bottle of Martell cognac he downed in a single evening.32
Here, Ki seems to draw our attention to several questions at once. First,
we are directed to the differences that must exist between this spare list (the
Orion radio set, the Collected Works of Maxim Gorky, a barrel, lined fabric,
and Martell cognac) and the full inventory of the fathers goods. We are left
wondering what else would be on this list and realizing that this list could
never be complete. Second, we are directed to the fact that the narrator herself
31
32

Ibid., 46.
Ibid., 58.

14

Katherine Holt

has edited the inventory, choosing just a few objects as important. This
leads us to wonder who is editing the Encyclopedia itself? Theoretically, the
compiler is not editing anything, but including everything with tender loving
care, but since we have just seen an editor at work, we cant help but wonder: has anything been excised from this list? Any empty beer bottles or discarded ticket stubs? And finally, this passage draws our attention to the question of intention. The narrator of this story trusts completely in the authority
of the work, noting that those who undertake the difficult and praiseworthy
task of recordingeverything that can be recorded concerning those who
have completed their earthly journey do so in what is doubtless an objective
and impartial manner.33 Similarly, she seems unconcerned with who, exactly,
is able to compile all this information, noting simply that:
It is the work of a religious organization or sect whose democratic
program stresses an egalitarian vision of the world of the dead, a vision that is doubtless inspired by some biblical precept and aims at
redressing human injustices and granting all Gods creatures an equal
place in eternity.34
The narrators trust seems to come too easily in this unnamed democratic
program, however, for us to take it at face value. We are encouraged to be
skeptical and to see the potential for the abuse of such texts and the people
they inscribe. Together, all these questions raised by The Encyclopedia of
the Dead prompt the reader to understand not only the impossibility of fully
capturing the world, but also the sinister nature of such a project.
Listing as Protest

As in Garden, Ashes and Hourglass, Kis use of enumeration as a device

in The Encyclopedia of the Dead is not just a tool for exploring the diversity of things, as his 1985 interview might imply. Enumeration here is also a
tool of political protest against the kind confident positivism that led to the
execution of his father. If Adorno and Horkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment warns us that the logical outcome of Kants completely rational subject
is fascism, Kis lists warn us that the logical effect of using the word to describe the world is participation in a totalitarian system. For his lists make
clear that there is no room for verbal play divorced from historical realities
and that any attempt to map the world completely is suspect. This is not to say
33
34

Danilo Ki, Encyclopedia of the Dead, 43.

Ibid., 44.

Enlisting Words Against Words

15

that all those who employ the word are equally guilty, in Kis ethical
framework, for he implicitly endorses those projects, like his own, that use the
word to protect objects and people from suffering. But it is to say that no use
of the word, in Kis writings, is innocent. While found objects might float
free of historical problems in a Joseph Cornell box, such is not the case in a
Danilo Ki list. Inscription, in his eyes, is always suspect, whether it pulls
objects together in a simulated garbage heap or relegates human beings to a
camp.

kmh2135@columbia.edu