Victor Sonkin. Public

The public is a fool
Milorad Pavic. The Inside of the Wind: A Novel about Hero and Leander. Translation by L. Savelyeva

Victor Sonkin

Date of publication: September 1, 2000

Maybe I shouldn't write this note. I'm too irritated. Irritation is a bad adviser. On the other hand, I intended this column to be biased and non-academic. No, that’s not it either - it sounds like I’m making excuses. Pipes.

The public is a fool; loves cheap tricks. This simple truth does not require much proof; but when a figure like Milorad Pavic rises to the literary Olympus, the truism suddenly appears in all its menacing enormity.

Let us leave aside the fact that Pavich’s philological achievements are doubtful, that his translation of “Eugene Onegin” is a form of mockery of Pushkin, that in Serbia there are many subtle, witty, touching, caustic writers (all qualities that Pavich lacks) √ and Nobody translates them into forty languages. Concentrating on the literary work of Pavic himself, we will see that he is a dubious intellectual, a bad storyteller, completely devoid of a sense of proportion and a sense of humor.

Separately, all these vices are not so terrible. But taken together, they add up to a frightening picture of professional incompetence. Let's try in order.

Pavić's works are often characterized as intellectual bestsellers. This means that a person who reads only to pass the time on a train or plane is unlikely to discover Pavich’s novel: it’s too boring. Reading Pavich presupposes belonging to some higher caste, the caste of intellectuals. I honestly tried to understand what was going on here, but I still didn’t understand. Pavich does not demonstrate any deep knowledge in any field: grains of historical facts in his novels are so thickly mixed with fables and outright nonsense that it is impossible to catch him by the hand. The foreign reader must be fascinated by some exotic little things like the bizarre sound of Serbian names (in Pavic their bizarreness is also greatly exaggerated); one gets the impression that in The Inside of the Wind the author deliberately piles up such details for the sake of the reader of the translations. This is a bluff; this is unfair. I'm not even talking about cheap tricks like the "male" and "female" versions of the "Khazar Dictionary" or the flip book in the form of which "The Inside of the Wind" was published (so it can be read from both the "Gero side" and the "side of the wind" Leander's side"). This is all wonderful when there is some kind of structural design behind it, some kind of non-trivial idea. For Pavich, this is just so that no one would guess, as in the joke about the Armenian who painted a herring green.

Pavić's helplessness as a storyteller is clearly evident in the fact that his plots are impossible to retell and his characters impossible to sympathize with. If you have read the Khazar Dictionary more than just now, you most likely will not be able to remember at all who the heroes are and what they do. The Inside of the Wind at least has Hero and Leander; but an attempt to isolate some of their characteristics from the text again encounters serious difficulties. You will say that this is not a novel of propositions, but a novel of ideas; great, I have nothing against it; Give me one single idea from there that would not have been sucked out of thin air. On almost any page you can find maxims like “The death of a person lasts as long as his life, and perhaps much longer, because death is a complex economy, work and effort, more difficult and active than human life.” . Put five people with a humanities background in one room, and in an hour they will produce enough meaningless gravitas to fill another Pavich novel. I hate maxims and aphorisms as a genre; collections of “clever thoughts” are most often unbearably superficial; but collect Pavic's maxims in a row, and you will see that they do not withstand even such a gentle test.

The lack of a sense of proportion especially upsets me, because it is in this area, in my opinion, that a crack opens for the author into some other, more interesting world. But Pavic passes by time after time. In “The Inside Side of the Wind” he writes: “And at that moment Hero felt that the witchcraft that surrounded her, or a dream, or a fantasy, who knows what it was, suddenly burst like a soap bubble . ” What an effect would be had if after this the narrative became emphatically realistic, - well, at least for a little while! √ without mustachioed breasts and forked tongues. No, the same organ continues to play. Or in the “Khazar Dictionary” a mirror is mentioned that reflects objects with a delay of several seconds, √ a wonderful phantasmagoric idea, I should stop here √ no, Pavich meticulously describes how exactly this happens, as if the reader is such a moron that he cannot imagine it himself able. Of course, such persistence causes nothing but irritation.

Pavic seems to be considered a postmodernist. Since no one knows what postmodernism is anyway, this definition fits it as well as any other. What distinguishes Pavić from other authors who are also considered postmodernists is his depressing lack of sense of humor. When Hero(inya) breaks a hard-boiled egg on his forehead, this action is not intended to make you smile (it doesn’t): it’s supposedly a symbol, but guess what, you can guess for yourself (no one knows anyway, and Pavich in the first place turn; he, as always, is concentrated and seriously bluffing). Maybe this is a Balkan peculiarity (although other authors from the former Yugoslavia are not distinguished by this - at least not all). I suspect that this infection comes from France (Serbian culture has always been emphatically Gallophilic) with its terribly serious postmodernists and deconstructionists; but I am not knowledgeable enough to judge this with confidence.

I struggled for a long time, but could not understand why Pavich’s cheap tricks were so loved by the public. She's probably an idiot after all.

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