WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch Kiš’s vigilance: ethics as aesthetics in the prose of Danilo Kiš Nedeljkovic, M. This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © Ms Marijana Nedeljkovic, 2016. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: ((http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] KIŠ’S VIGILANCE: ETHICS AS AESTHETICS IN THE PROSE OF DANILO KIŠ MARIJANA NEDELJKOVIC A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Westminster for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2016 Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies 1 List of Contents Abstract 4 Quotes 5 Acknowledgements 6 Declaration 7 Introduction 8 1.Kiš’s poetics: Homo poeticus, regardless 13 2. A brief literature review 26 3. Thesis outline 37 Chapter 1. Kiš’s Trilogy, the Shoah and Impossibility of Dying 41 1. Kiš’s ‘aesthetics of ugliness’ 42 2. ‘Faction’ as impossibility of committing a perfect murder: tracing the document and/or documenting the trace of the il y a 53 3. ‘Family Circus’ as the narratives of impossibility (of death) 61 a. Hourglass (1972) 61 b. Garden, ashes (1965) 76 c. Early Sorrows (1969) 88 Chapter 2. Kiš and the Question of Responsibility 97 1. Literature as apparitional counter-companion to history 97 2. A language of scepticism 114 3. Kiš’s ‘disappointing’ apocalypse: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and Encyclopaedia of the Dead as narratives of the impossible 121 2 Chapter 3. Kiš and the Question of Freedom 149 1. Unreconciled world: the freedom of artwork and the question of commitment 150 1.1. Ranciѐre’s ‘politics of aesthetics’ vs. ‘ethical turn’ 159 1.2. Kiš: Homo poeticus, regardless 170 2. Kiš’s ‘art of proximity’: the freedom of artwork as ethical excess 175 3. Hourglass and the comic-antiheroic paradigm in relation to dying 187 Chapter 4. Kiš and Suffering 200 1. Unavowable community and the question of future democracy 201 2. Levinas and Kiš: suffering as ‘a duty beyond all debt’ 216 3. Recurrence from A to B: homelessness begins at home 229 Toward a Conclusion: between hope and hopelessness 238 Bibliography 244 3 This thesis offers a reading of the late Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš by looking at how a particular tradition of European aesthetics and ethical philosophy (namely Levinas and Blanchot) can be compared to Danilo Kiš’s poetics. Beyond critically evaluating Kiš, I am to make connections between ethics, literature and philosophy. The major objective of my thesis is to argue that ethical is embedded as aesthetical in Kiš’s poetics as both Blanchotian and Levinasian understanding of ethics, i.e. as a non-dialectical and non-intentional movement from ‘I’ to the ‘other’ in the midst of passivity of dying (which is for both Blanchot and Levinas ‘other’ death). The thesis demonstrates that there are a number of strands in Levinas’s and Blanchot’s thought that, while differently expressed, can also be traced at work in Kiš’s writing, and which can, as such, help to elucidate certain crucial aspects of the latter. Taking into consideration Kiš’s obsessive writing on the violence of the last century – both left and right – I argue that what permeates his prose is death as both possibility and a radical impossibility consequent upon the il y a, a crucial philosophical concept in Levinas’s ethical philosophy and Blanchot’s literary ‘theory’. For this reason, the thesis aims to assert that what permeates Kiš’s prose is what Critchley terms ‘atheist transcendence’: the burden of responsibility for the death of the other human radically excludes theodicy. My research is significant in so far as conceptualisations of death to be found in continental European philosophy have hardly been directly juxtaposed with those found in Kiš’s prose. Since according to Blanchot, literature’s demand is always ambiguous and as such it exposes us to the question of being, in my thesis I analyse how this refusal of language to cease the tension of pluralism operates in Kiš’s prose as the ethical. 4 We call ethical a relationship between terms such as are untied neither by a synthesis of the understanding nor by a relationship between subject or object, and yet where the one weighs or concerns or is meaningful to the other, where they are bound by a plot which knowing can neither exhaust nor unravel – Levinas But I say: beware of writers who don’t know what they’ve written and why – Kiš My books are, in a certain way, cenotaphs, empty tombs created in memory of them [E.S. and Novsky] – Kiš [The human relation], as it affirms itself in its primacy, is terrible. Most terrible, but without terror. It is most terrible because it is tempered by no intermediary. For in this view there is between man and man neither god, nor value, nor nature. It is a naked relation, without myth, devoid of religion, free of sentiment, bereft of justification, and giving rise neither to pleasure nor to knowledge: a neutral relation, or the very neutrality of relation. Can this really be asserted? – Blanchot 5 I am extremely grateful to my supervisor Dr. David Cunnigham for his invaluable advice, time and selfless dedication to this thesis. His encouragement kept the project going even when at times it felt almost impossible to complete. To my nephew, Lennox who, like any child, is the insatiable source of all creative thinking – “Als das Kind Kind war, ging es mit hängenden Armen”. To Dennis, for your friendship and “a house of music for our bright affection” – from Rimbaud to Mark E. Smith. This thesis is dedicated to my mother Milanka for her unconditional love that humbles me every day – “with such knowledge, the waging of dying is love”. 6 I, Marijana Nedeljkovic, declare that all the material contained in this thesis is my own work. Any information that has derived from other sources has been acknowledged in the thesis. 7 Kiš’s Vigilance: Ethics as Aesthetics in the Prose of Danilo Kiš Introduction My literary work within the realm of belles lettres is a clearly construed attitude [approach] and escape, because I believe in the primordial aspects of art as such and literature as such. Because I believe that art, that literature, is not only a realm of aesthetics but also a realm of ethics. And thus, the so-called pure art, which is today mentioned only pejoratively, is also a form of engagement; it is not only a school of aesthetics but also a school of ethics.1 – Danilo Kiš Danilo Kiš is one of the most important European writers of the second half of the twentieth century. A survivor of fascism, his prose often deals with the relation between an oppressed individual or outsider and totalitarian mechanisms of power. In Kiš’s literature, I will argue, history is a collection of repetitive slaughterhouses (or, as he once claimed, ‘terrifying Pascalian spaces’) in which the power invested in an ideology (whether political or religious) must ultimately destroy the singular lives of individuals in order to achieve its own goals;2 a destruction that the literary work must both reflect and resist in simultaneously aesthetic and ethical form. Kiš was born on the 22nd of February 1935 in Subotica, a Yugoslav-Hungarian border town, to a Hungarian Jewish father and Montenegrin Orthodox Christian mother. During World War Two, he lost his father and several other family members in Auschwitz. In 1942, he survived the massacre of Jews and Serbs in Novi Sad that was carried out by Hungarian fascists only by virtue of the fact that he was baptised in the town’s Orthodox Christian church. He spent his early childhood in Hungary and, after the war ended, moved to Montenegro with his mother and sister. He 1 My translation. From an interview ‘Moć i Nemoć Angažovanosti’ [Power and Powerlessness of Engagement], in Kiš, Danilo, Po-etika, knjiga druga (1974), glavni i odgovorni urednik Milutin Stanislavac, Konferencija Saveza studenata Jugoslavije (Mala edicija ideje), Beograd, pp. 31-2. In Serbian: ‘Moje književno stvaralaštvo u okviru i u zagrljaju Beletre jeste jasno koncipiran stav i bekstvo, jer verujem u primordijalne kvalifikative umetnosti kao takve, književnosti kao takve, jer verujem da umetnost, da književnost, jeste etičko, a ne samo estetičko opredeljenje i da je tzv. danas u pejorativnom smislu pominjana, čista umetnost takođe svojevrstan angažman, to je ne samo škola estetike, nego i škola etike.’ 2 See Kiš’s 1980 speech ‘Između Nade i Beznađa’, [Between Hope and Hopelessness] for the Grand Aigle d'Or award from Nice. In Kiš, Danilo, Eseji autopoetike (2000), priredio Jovan Zivlak, Svetovi, Novi Sad, pp.142-145. Translation into English by Paul Milan Foster can be read here: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Three+essays.-a015074220. Last visited September 8, 2016. 8 studied comparative literature in Belgrade and was the first student to graduate from the Department of Comparative Literature (which was back then newly formed). After leaving university, he wrote both fictional and non-fictional works, including plays, essays and literary-theoretical writings, and was also responsible for the translations of many important works from French, Hungarian and Russian into Serbo-Croat language. Amongst French authors Kiš, for instance, translated both Exercices de style (1947) and Zazie dans le métro (1959) by Raymond Queneau.