Enlisting Words Against Words: Danilo Kiš's Enumeration

Danilo Kiš 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 One's 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 Kiš 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 Kiš's texts. The device is so frequently and strikingly employed that Aleksandar Hemon could refer blithely, in his introduction to Garden, Ashes, to "Kiš, ever a master of lists."⁴

And yet, despite Kiš's 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:

Enumeration is primarily the reduction of objects to the spitting image of the world. Naming is creating.

I've 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 résumé of a world, the simplest of résumés. 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 hadn't been amazed by the same sort of jumble as a child, I don't think I'd 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 Lautréamont's formula. ⁶

Following Kiš's 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 Kiš 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 father's 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 Kiš's poetics. It emphasizes that Kiš is not merely interested in celebrating the "objects of chance encounter," but is committed to protecting such objects—and their human counterpoints—from abuse. It reminds us, moreover, that everywhere in his oeuvre Kiš is actively engaged with ethical questions such as whether, after the Holocaust, poetry could ever again be free of violence.⁷

To understand the stakes of Kiš's 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 Kiš's 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 Kiš's 1966 poem because, at least at first glance, it appears to function according to Ki...