“PARABASIS” IN THE ANATOMY LESSON BY DANILO KIŠ**

The research focus of this paper is the chapter “Parabasis” of the polemical book The Anatomy Lesson by Danilo Kiš. The author aims to draw a parallel with the genealogical characteristics of the parabasis in ancient comedy to explain its function in The Anatomy Lesson and to examine the veracity of Kiš’s self-interpretation, and thus the justification of his creative self-consciousness.

Past, very intense studies of the literary work of Danilo Kiš emphasized the numerous problems and dimensions of meaning opened by his polemical book The Anatomy Lesson, but none of them addressed its structural and genealogical features in more detail. It is our intention to contribute to this study by focusing on the chapter "Parabasis" and its function in the aforementioned book. We have analyzed the importance of this chapter from the standpoint of autopoetics in the context of studying Kiš's essay writing (Бечејски 2016: 233-238), and now we will deepen this research with the aim of demonstrating its contribution to literary genealogy.
In order to determine why the writer considered this form suitable for his polemical book and where he saw its modernity, we will briefly look at the structure and function of the original parabasis. Parabasis is the most important choral song in ancient Greek comedy, a whole where broken by the stage illusion: the actors leave the stage while the chorus removes their masks and takes the stage, addressing the audience directly. The word itself means go aside, leaving the basic course of action in the agon (the parabasis was performed somewhere in the middle, after the agon) and, metaphorically speaking, it is a kind of author's comment, whether autopoetic and metapoetic -about the conditions and manner of the poet's work, etc., either about religion or the current political situation in Athens, with a subjectivist view of current politicians. The composition and extent of the parabasis differ from drama to drama, but basically it has two obligatory parts, the first of which is metrically free (the choir leader reciting) and the second has a strophic structure. In the first part, the coryphaeus addresses the audience on behalf of the poet, seeking audience's sympathy, while the choir marches past the audience and literally leaves the stage. In full form, the parabasis has seven parts, three of which are part of the first main part: commation, or short introduction, a real parabase, in which the poet talks about his work, social merits, competitors, etc., recommending himself to the audience through the choir, and the second part, i.e. completion. The other obligatory part of the parabasis is the chorus song, which consists of four symmetrical units. In them, ode and antode -two lyric songs in honor of deities, alternate with epirrhema and antepirrhema -reciting in the spirit of joke and mockery at the expense of local authorities, including the audience themselves, etc. Thus, the most common content of the parabasis is the following: poet addresses listeners, praises his own work, emphasizes his own literary goals and contribution to the development of drama with reference to its predecessors, comic bragging, criticism to the audience, addressing judges (sometimes with comic threats); mockery of some Athenians, parenesis (reprimand, advice) to the audience. (Flašar 1992: 381-382;Koljević 1992: 564;Ђурић 1996: 343-344;Popović 2010: 508, 632-633) Parabasis disappeared from comedy already in the Aristophanes age, and was returned to drama by Goethe (in Faust). It unmasks the usual dramatic discourse by turning portrayal into critical reflection, so many researchers see it as the origin of irony. Friedrich Schlegel studied the importance of parabasis precisely by interpreting romantic irony as a special form of literary self-consciousness that does not perceive irony as a mere rhetorical figure, but as a form of understanding the world, life and creative philosophy, wherein it receives an epistemological status (Popović 2010: 508, 632-633).
With all this in mind, it becomes clear why the master of irony, Danilo Kiš, in his polemic book, resorts to parabasis. Especially as the literary polemic over the originality of the A Tomb for Boris Davidovič has turned into a public spectacle, a scandalous affair for the entertainment of the underbred world, as the author suggests with the motto of the first chapter of The Anatomy Lesson (ČA: 11), 1 the title "Parabasis" can also be understood as unmasking of the performative in this polemic and the ironic allusion to (life) tragicomedy. Like the parabasis in ancient Greek comedy, the chapter "Parabasis" is composed of two parts, "Frontal Collision" and "Touchstone of Facts", which consist of smaller essay sections. In relation to the original form, Kiš enlarges the number of sections in each of the two main parts of the parabasis, but retains their content and function mutatis mutandis at the level of the whole. Highlighting the autopoetic traits he considers representative, he concisely explains and observes them in relation to his own individuality, on the one hand, and contemporary literary trends (the notion of modernity), on the other, with a simultaneous mockery of those (critics, aestheticians, writers) who were to recognize this breaking of the cliché, that writer's authenticity, rather than accusing him of plagiarism. Although he points out that he will remain on the literary ground as he is challenged on it, and that he will write about the political background of the polemic on another occasion, the author strives, not drawing attention from the literary essence of the polemic, to unmask the clerical and corrupt literary criticism, the "literary banditry", in collusion with centers of political power which, instead of refining taste and raising aesthetic criteria, harms our literature by encapsulating it in national frames. Thus, he remains loyal to the genre of the original parabasis, which also implies an authorial reference to the political situation in the country. In order to explain the key autopoetic features, in this case, the themes delimited by the titles of the segments, he resorts to summarizing using metaphorical language and invoking the autarkic symbols of his prose. Thus, to a connoisseur of Kiš's opus, this chapter reveals itself also as an autopoetic summary -both of those poetic features he, dissatisfied with the interpretation of the criticism, already pointed out, and those he is about to explain in interviews and autopoetically intoned essays. We will endeavor to examine both the truthfulness of the author's self-interpretation and the justification of the creative self-consciousness he has expressed here.
The "Frontal Collision" consists of sections: "Judaism", "Borges", "Individuality", "A French Garden", "European Chalk Circle", "A. А. Darmolatov" and "Elephantiasis nostras". Although all of them, in principle, aim to justify the poetical practices applied in The Tomb, the first three are significant from the standpoint of literary theory, while the fourth, sixth, and seventh, in their ironic and satirical portrayal of our literary criticism belong to both literary ethics and sociology of culture.
In order to distance himself from the "Jewish writer" epithet already at the outset, in the first section, Kiš outlines his understanding and experience of Judaism, thus deepening his previous views and explaining those understandings he expressed in his belles-lettres prose. Since the Jews in his books are a metaphor, a form of formalistic defamiliarization, not a sign of the author's religious and national commitment, the Jewishness in them cannot be interpreted as a "Jewish complex" (ČA: 49). For, as he explained his thematic obsessions earlier, this world of Central European Jews -a "former world" -had already acquired the "patina of the unreal and the echo of the mythical" (HP: 204).
Moreover, nationalists do not accept the theory of the Jews assimilation by Arthur Koestler, which Kiš had proven by both "idea and living" even before he encountered it. Any commitment beyond the national -even commitment to Yugoslav, let alone European and world literature (in the meaning given to the term by Goethe and expanded by Borges) -is regarded by nationalists as literary "homelessness", the cunningness of a "wandering Jew". In psychological and metaphysical terms, for the writer, Jewishness is that feeling of "family unhappiness" from which anxiety, the impression of relativity and irony stem. In his characters, it is a "kind of latent rebellion", which "has something of that powerful and mysterious affective attraction Freud speaks about, something of that 'disturbing strangeness' […], which is already in itself a form of defamiliarization also on the literary plane". The function of Judaism in A Tomb for Boris Davidovič, where "the share of Jewishness is as much as it was in the Bolshevik movement itself", is twofold: to provoke the "effect of defamiliarization" and to "extend mythemes" in the author's opus (ČA: 47-50).
So, in literary and existential terms, Jewishness is shown to be Kiš's obsessive theme, a lived and felt experience transposed into literature: "Without that ambiguity of origin, without that 'disturbing diversity' Jewishness brings, and without the adversity of my warlike childhood, I would definitely not become a writer", as he points out in his interview "Life, Literature" (ŽL: 10). And referring to the character and prototype of the Father in the family trilogy, who suffered from the neurosis of fear, "an endemic disease of Central European Jewish intelligence", the writer emphasizes: "He is a patient, an alcoholic, a neurasthenic, a Jew, in one word ideal material for a literary character" (ŽL: 15-16). Warning that literature is above and beyond any commitment: religious, national, sexual, and that he himself does not accept the "literary ghetto", even after The Anatomy Lesson Kiš used every opportunity to express his disdain for minority literature. 2 The second section of The Frontal Collision is dedicated to Borges, one of the writers most important for understanding Kiš's poetic and literary tradition. He points out the merits providing the great Argentine with a frontier position in the history of modern short story, and then associates them with autopoetics: I have all that is needed here: the executioner and the victim, and time distance, because that Central European Judaism has disappeared, and those who are there no longer live in the same conditions. It is a history of a nearly fantastic realism, as it is about real things that, at the same time, do not exist, they are gone" (GTI: 205-206; see also ŽL: 9, 87).
"There is no doubt that short stories, more precisely the short story art, are divided into those before Borges, and those after Borges. And here I am not referring to the expansion of the field of reality (in the direction of fiction), but first and foremost to the technique of storytelling itself: the Maupassant-Chekhov-O. Henry storytelling, which aspired to detail and which created its field of mythemes by induction, was replaced by Borges with a magical and revolutionary endeavor, deduction, which is just another name for a kind of narrative symbolism whose consequences are on a theoretical and practical plane no less than those left by that same symbolism in poetry with the appearance of Baudelaire" (ČA: 50).
Referring to Shklovsky's famous thesis on literary development as shifting of genre systems, or forms that have already lost their artistic properties due to frequent use -Kiš stresses that no theory is necessary for this knowledge, talent is sufficient. "For what is a talent other than this deviation from the canon, what Christiansen calls 'differential sensations'!" It is precisely this "differential sensation" he himself strives for, as he points out, and which provides his books with non-anachronicity, i.e., modernity, that domestic criticism could use as a more precise "compass" when interpreting and evaluating from "Judaism", a generational approach and anachronistic form-content, realism-fiction dichotomies: "And if I use in my books the experiences of the modern European and American novel, certainly by affinity, it is not because, by the grace of heaven, I have been able to read some novels and some theoretical works unavailable to other mortals, but because I have felt, anticipated that things have been changing in the world of literary phenomena, moving together with the famous Hegelian Weltgeist, and because I wanted to disrupt canons and anachronisms, by the theme and procedure, with my own mytheme, at least in the context of national literature" (ČA: 51-52).
Kiš does not deny the "Western influences" (although they are not without political connotations in our midst), nor does he exclude himself from the universal rule formulated by Brunetière -"of all the influences in the history of literature the main is the influence of work on work". The question that should be crucial for critique is whether and to what extent the writer has succeeded in creating a "differential sensation" in relation to all the "influences": "as far as I managed to create my own authentic work (when it comes to Hourglass), within the influence of the so-called nouveau roman, for example, and, starting from a literary theory (nouveau roman), managed to create an authentic romanesque world that is polemical and parodic relative to the aforementioned role model and, in my humble belief, at least in the case of nouveau roman, superior" (ČA: 53).
Since the expected critical remarks were absent, the writer is forced to respond alone, in the spirit of parabasis, at times humorously and derisively, at times ironically and autoironically, pointing out his own merits for the development of the novel and narrative prose. Drawing on Borges, Kiš explains his "differential sensation" in relation to "role models" and at the same time seeks to oppose the idea of national literature and its restriction to national themes (Borhes 1985a: 266, 269-270). Kiš does not follow patterns but writes "counterbooks" as "'A book that does not contain its own counter-book', Borges says in one place, 'is considered unnecessary'". Thus, in the Tomb he uses the technical procedures perfected by Borges (but taken from Poe and Babel), which "are nothing but the mastery of using and tricking documentary material". 3 However, while in Borges, where man is understood as a philosopheme, this documentary process generally has a metaphysical meaning, the Tomb is "based precisely on historicity, the documents are there to discover that historicity, and the soul has long since been surrendered to the devil. The Borges man is a yogi, characters from the Tomb are commissioners" (ČA: 53).
Kiš will also discuss Borges and his own reliance on the Argentine writer in other sections of Anatomy Lesson, pointing to his documentary process. As theoretical support to the first paragraph in Chapter Three of Anatomy Lesson, the author inserted the texts of Sylvia Molloy "Borges and the Literary Distance" (1969) and Roger Caillois "Jorge Luis Borges" (1964), which draw attention to Borges' art of citation (ČA: 116-129). Namely, by combining recognizable, deformed and fictional quotations and bibliographical references, he caricatures and abolishes tradition, demonstrating the futility of searching for sources and the reader's desire to decipher them all (to which several well-known quotes lure him). Borges' narrative mastery is 'a priori reduced to quoting literature'; and that is literature 'which, takes the very constituting substance from literature itself and not from 'reality' -however real or imaginary' (ČA: 116-119). The aim of this quotation mystification is to create "an associative and intellectual echo" and to point out that in belles lettres -there are no sources, as Kiš points out. That is the essence of the literary aspect of the polemic over the Tomb originality, which takes over this Borgesian technique. But what our critique has not noticed, and what is more important, are the differences: the Borgesian "technical forms", which achieved "metaphysical timeliness", are applied in Kiš to historical and political material. This, he points out, was a "new literary approach to reality" (ČA: 122-123).
In order to understand the difference between the aspect of the Borgesian literary tradition adopted and continued by Kiš and the mere imitation -the essential difference, which his opponents did not understand -one of the basic principles of Borgesian poetics should be borne in mind: "The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the

creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. […] A book which
does not contain its counter-book is considered incomplete" (Borhes 2006: 15, 18). Therefore, there are neither original themes nor original works (authorship in the standard sense), but only new editorials that maintain their sequence. For Borges, writing was rewriting, another layer on the palimpsest. That is why he considered it unnecessary to fill in the many pages that already exist and instead wrote, as he explicitly claimed, their summary, commentary (Borhes 1985b: 137;Borhes 1985d: 40;Borhes 1985c: 20). On this background, Kiš's poetics coincides with Borges's. Much has already been written in our literary criticism as to how Kiš is the successor and follower of the Borgesian creative paradigm (Делић 1994: 347-352; Делић 1997: 112-130; Милутиновић 2016: 75-82). In Borges's literary work, as well as in numerous studies on his prose and poetics, the key poetic hubs of D. Kiš can be recognized. In addition to technical and thematic coincidences and parallels in similarity, it also pointed to differences, which our writer insisted on. Being a "borgesian" also implies a polemical attitude towards Borgesian poetics.
Following the composition of the ancient Greek parabasis, and to answer to his opponent Dragan Jeremić on the accusation that he 'suddenly began to create some new poetics, the poetics of documentary prose in the spirit of his latest work, which even negated his earlier works that were created based on completely different principles' (according to ČA: 130), in the 'Individuality' section Kiš first draws a parallel between Hourglass and Tomb. In doing so, he illustrates that both books are based on the documentary process "restricting the free field of fantasy", that the documentary line in his books has existed since Psalm 44, and that it developed in parallel with the other, metaphysical, born with Mansarda. He then draws a parallel between heroes of E. S. and B. D. Novsky, a yogi and a commissioner, illustrating that these are "powerful individuals immersed in the center of historical events", guided by suspicion and seeking to preserve their individuality -which is already a victim position (ČA: 54-56).
The absence of such individuality will serve Kiš in the French Garden section as a basis for sharp criticism of Yugoslav literary criticism, which treats the work as a sociological, collective, generational creation, reducing everything new and unknown to the old and the known: "This generational or collectivist spirit of balancing kills the value and meaning of every book, each individual voice, one book is dissolved by another, good by average, excellent by bad, the content value of one is killed by the formal imperfection of the other, and vice versa, the negative points of one are attributed to the positive points of the other, plus and minus cancel out, so again there was nothing, only one generation replaced the other.
[…] everything is gray or drenched in gray, covered with camouflage tarpaulin, everything is lined up like in a French garden, everything that protrudes is cut, everything is minimized, depreciated, everything is 'positive'." (ČA: 57) Such a climate has allowed literary criticism to grow into a "literary power" that does not serve literature but is served by literature -as if interpretation and evaluation is superior to literary creation itself -and critics are "keepers of court seals, titular advisers" tasked with "maintaining the French garden" (which increasingly resembles a cemetery) and "marking the alleys". Under the same balancing the reader disappears as a co-creator, the author points out. Thus, Тhe Anatomy Lesson outgrows the defense of only one book and one poetics, and becomes an apologia for writer's ethics, cosmopolitanism, creative freedom, freedom of "public opinion", which is precisely what this literary criticism was supposed to defend.
The following are three short sections that relate to the subject of the stories in the Tomb, but from which Kiš's dissatisfaction with the development of Yugoslav literature emerges again. He points out that the "European Chalk Circle" in his chained collection encompasses a chronotope in which the objective "Spirit of Storytelling" transforms into "The Storyteller's Spirit, which here, in the end, appears as a clearly emphasized I of the narrator". In the fragments "A. А. Darmolatov" and "Elephantiasis nostras", Kiš underlines that the history of the unfortunate commissioner from "A brief biography of A. A. Darmolatov" (Grobnica: 137-146) is in fact "a fable", "the morality, moral of the whole book". He brings its symbolism and sarcastic sting to the plane of criticism of our literature, where "the word muda [balls] is derived from the adjective mudar [wise]" and "the head is indeed a kind of annoyance" as "using your head" means -playing with it (ČA: 58-60).
Kiš entitled the second major part of the parabasis "The Touchstone of Facts", borrowing the syntagm from M. Yourcenar. It starts with the section "Schizopsychology" and continues with the fragments "Psychological Approach", "Material for Narrative Shaping", "Obsessive Topics" and "Dogs and Books". In a brief statement given for Borges: "The modern form of fiction is erudition" (which will be further explained in the next chapter by "Little Chrestomathy" and accompanying comments), summarized the whole poetics of modern literature, says Kiš. This means that "the time of fabrication is over, that the reader no longer believes in fabrication" and that "nothing is more fantastic than reality", as Dostoyevsky claimed. After Hiroshima, the fantasy of reality appeared to modern man as a fantastic reality: "a spooky sight of a city like the moon's ground, with two hundred thousand dead and to the stupendous scale deformed human bodies, was the scene which the medieval (still) fantasy of a great poet could only reach by the power of the boldest imagination, imagining a similar scene only somewhere outside this world, in the far reaches of eternal punishment and repentance" (ČA: 61). The consequence of this accumulated evil of "fantasy of reality", that paranoid human behavior, which Koestler calls "schizophysiology", results in "schizopsychology", Kiš points out. 4 Hence the psychological approach by which the writer once interpreted the "broken prohibitions" of his characters (and whose criticism, as a "field of banality", a brief fragment of this whole is devoted to), has been replaced by documents and facts "whose frantic and unpredictable conjunction creates a senseless massacre incorporating equally sociological, ethnological, parapsychological, occult and similar motives, the interpretation of which in the old-fashioned way would be more than meaningless […]: it is the duty of the writer to fix this paranoid reality, to examine this insane set of circumstances, through the power of documents, examination, investigation, and not to attempt to, on their own, and optionally, make a diagnosis and propose treatment and medication" (ČA: 62). Poetics becomes poethics. Kiš's work, deeply marked by the twentieth-century holocausts, in moral terms too represents "post-Auschwitz poetics" (Vladiv-Glover 2003: 71-79), according to which the writer is no longer tasked with giving a psychological profile of his characters but "with expressing schizopsychology of the new post-Auschwitz reality". "Schizopsychology" thus becomes a suitable term for the poetic paradigm of modern literature.
Therefore, in the fragment "Material for Narrative Shaping" Kiš emphasizes that the plots of all stories in the Tomb are based on historical documents, thus putting his stories before the "touchstone of facts". Although the plot, according to Shklovsky's formulation, is 'only material for narrative shaping,' with authentic plots he wanted to point to the 'psychological blindness' of the French leftists (Sartre). Because being a professional writer means "living in constant conflict with yourself and with the world", he concludes in the spirit of his teacher Andrić's life philosophy.
As one of his main poetic features, Kiš also mentions "obsessive themes" (in the eponymous section) in Parabasis, noting that he does not write "as a professional, but as 'a poet'", "in a kind of poetic trance", exclusively about topics that intellectually and/or morally obsess him, "when the glass is overfilled, when an intellectual, moral or lyrical dilemma and doubt has grown in me to such an extent that I feel the need to communicate it to someone". That his "modest bibliography" is the result of "that 'poetic approach to' the phenomena of reality", that poetic compression, with writing being some sort of liberation, autotherapy (ČA: 64-65), can be assured by following the variation of particular topics and the formulation in his opus, the search for the "ideal form" all the way to the so-called "grace of shaping" for any literary content that would obsess him. 5 5 In the interview "The Conscience of an Unknown Europe", the writer will further explain this type of psychotherapy: "I write because I question my whole life. Literature is the therapy for this... of course, the cure 'après coup' medicine, late therapy, because while the misfortune lasts the cure does not work. It is not about some mania then, it is about illness. Indirectly, when I write, I am in an intimate relationship with the topic For Kiš was convinced -and rightly so -that if the topic is not obsessive for the writer in both literary and moral and intellectual sense, neither the work he creates would be marked by truthfulness. 6 Thus, The Tomb, like his previous books, is the result of a moral obsession: to condemn Stalinism, to which democratic countries close their eyes, as does fascism.
In the spirit of the aforementioned, but also of all the oppressive systems criticized by the intellectuals of pronounced self-awareness, Kiš quotes the title of his story "Dogs and Books" (Grobnica: 119-136) as the last section of this whole, pointing out that by breaking the cliché in The Tomb he himself infuriated these dogs, so they began to "bark and bite", and that they understood its moral better than he had hoped. In doing so, he makes clear allusions to his "behind the scenes" opponents, the authors of the novels People with Four Fingers and Mouth Full of Earth -M. Bulatović and B. Šćepanović (ČA: 66-67).
If we keep in mind that Kiš understood literary development in the spirit of the theory of Russian formalism -as a shift and development of literary forms, wherein some worn-out forms, which are no longer capable of causing defamiliarization (Šklovski 1969: 43), replace others, parody them, re-actualize them and innovate those forgotten in the history of literature, elevate the "non-literary" to the literary level, or create new ones, with a new or altered type taking on an important role and task that the existing types are not capable of fulfilling at the given moment (Pavličić 1983: 73-77;Петковић 1984: 35), introduction of parabasis in polemic Anatomy Lesson proves to be a well thought out methodological procedure. Namely, by re-actualizing a forgotten type -a choral party in ancient Greek comedy -which represented the breaking of stage illusion and a special form of communication with the audience, ideal both for presenting poetics and for the critical reflection, in the spirit of the new (post) modern age, Kiš emphasizes its modernity and restores polemic as a literary I chose -or the topic that chose me. And writing is exactly the way to get rid of those obsessions. And it is suffering that triggers that kind of comfort machine, represented by literature" (GTI: 216). 6 The explanation and deepening of the notion of truthfulness of a literary work is found in the critical chapters of The Anatomy Lesson: "And this is, perhaps, only one of the definitions of gift, that seeking and choosing a relevant, burning topic, burning in the writer's spirit and sensibility, not seeking and finding a topic by the logic and assumptions of a possible best-seller and pampering the critics and the fashionable, hence stereotypical demands of the day and the moment. That truthfulness, that feeling of the toping, that passion dictated by the topic that flows from that topic, is just another name for truthfulness, for literary honesty. If, then, the matter came from that part of sensibility, from the inevitability to bring the topic, to bring the problem out of oneself, then even some literary, technical, rhetorical problems and moments would be solved (can be solved) and organized so that they become secondary: the work of art will live out of its own flame, of its own fire emanating from it. This is what truthfulness is. Truthfulness of inspiration, truthfulness of details, truthfulness of the topic and approach to the topic" ČA: 301-302).
genre. In doing so, those poethic hubs he has singled out to illustrate his own literary portrait are truly crucial to understanding his creative and ethical principles. The writer thus creates his own genealogical tradition, just as he 'creates his predecessors' (Sk: 156).