DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS

A Lexicon Novel in 1OO,OOO Words
By Milorad Pavic
Translated by Christina Priblcevic-Zoric

By Robert Coover

There is a tension in narrative, as in life, between the sensation of time as a linear experience, one thing following sequentially (causally or not) upon another, and time as a patterning of interrelated experiences reflected upon as though it had a geography and could be mapped. It is, in a sense, the tension between future time, which, with its promise of death and its intransigent sequence of days and nights, bears down upon us remorselessly, and time past, which, if it can be said to exist at all, exists only in cranial space, in that sprawling, multilevel and often chaotic house of our memory.

In the reading experience, this paradox is felt most immediately in our awareness that, even as we encounter the narrative word by word, the narrative itself exists, whole and finished, in the spatial object we hold in our hands, so that we may, if we choose, even on our first time through, throw off the guiding (or pushing) hand of the author and roam at will through the text, searching it for prurient or inspirational passages, say, or jumping ahead to the last chapters to see how It all comes out, or wandering in the backwaters forever, as though to grant a loved book a kind of illusory immortality or boundlessness. That is how a lot of people I know read Proust, for example.

Most written narratives express in some manner this tension between the unfolding narrative and its closed and inflexible text, but there are some, often thought of (in our time at least) as "innovative," which put it in the foreground. Such a book is the Yugoslav poet and scholar Milorad Pavic's witty and playful "Dictionary of the Khazars," which, with its chronologically disturbed alphabetized entries and its cross-referencing symbols, allows each reader to "put together the book for himself, as in a game of dominoes or cards." The reader may pursue a topic as with a dictionary, read the book from beginning to end, from left to right or right to left. or even "diagonally," working "in threes." He may even, Mr. Pavic suggests, "read the way he eats: he can use his right eye as a fork. his left as a knife, and toss the bones over his shoulder."

In truth, this is a book that is best read just about any way except cover to cover. For all its seeming complexity, it surrenders easily - even gratefully - to a reconstructed reading, and there are probably fewer choices for doing that than the author would have us believe. The dictionary is divided into three separately alphabetized books or "sources" (Christian, Islamic and Hebrew), prefaced by a set of "preliminary notes" and followed by appendixes (which in fact contain much of the meat of the narrative), and the story is divided into three periods in time, each of which has its three different central characters according to the sources. Thus: a 3-by-3 character matrix with subsets. The paths between the entries are plainly marked, and there are, after all, only 45 of these entries (and one of those a mere one-line reference), many fewer than one might expect in a "dictionary" of such presumed scope. Even getting lost, which is perhaps easier inside entries than between them, could be rewarding. Since this book responds in a sense to Jorge Luis Borges's appeal for a "history of dreams" (Borges lovers will find here many echoes and whisperings of the master librarian of Babel and discoverer of the "Encyclopedia of Tlon"), free-associative dreamlike passage.

The Khazars are said to be a lost people who flourished somewhere in the Balkans ("beyond the mountains", as it were) late in the first millennium. Though we are provided with a feast of entenaining folkloric anecdotes and "legends" applicable to any such fairy-tale kingdom, the only "historical" event chronicled is the "Khazar polemic", a fanciful ninth-century debate among three divines - Jewish, Christian and Muslim - for the souls of the Khazars, a debate from which the Khazars apparently never recovered. The present "Dictionary of the Khazars" announces itself as a 1980's reconstruction and updating of a destroyed 1691 book of the same name, which in turn was an amended reconstruction of the lost "dictionary" of the Khazar "dream hunters" of some eight centuries before, the sect that preceded and was absorbed by (or perhaps absorbed) the three religions. This ur-dictionary was a collection of dream observations, "along with biographies of the most prominent hunters and the captured prey," including the panicipants in the Khazar polemic.

This nesting of books within books, epochs within epochs, "inside one another like a set of hollow dolls", together with an alphabetical sorting of entries rather than a chronological one and the ability of many of the characters to pass in one embodiment or another from the pleasures it contains might best be absorbed in a age to age, further "spatializes" time, convincing some of the company here that increments of time might be objects of a son or that their lives might have been dreamed by others or inscribed in books "patterned according to a story told long, long ago." This is like Borges's celebrated metaphysicians of Tlon, who held that "all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process," and "that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men." The Khazars too dream one another's waking days and "imagine the future in terms of space, never time": "Only a pan of the future reaches us Khazars, the toughest and most impenetrable pan, which is hardest to master, and we brave it sideways, like a strong wind; or the moldering, worn debris and waste of the future that spreads imperceptibly, spilling over our feet like a puddle. ... We never know who gets the better, unchewed part in the general distribution and looting af the future."

There are hens here that lay "time eggs," hatching days of owner's life (if it looks to be a bad one, he can eat it instead of live it), weeks that receive "their monthly wash," seasons that contain two years going in opposite directions and shufffing the days between them like cards, and spent days visible "along the scabby skyline," shining "blue, small, and healthy, devoid of calendar names in the happily vanishing herd... leaving dust in their wake." On Monday evenings, one character "could take a different day fram his future and use it the following morning, in place of Tuesday. When he came to the day he had taken, he would use the skipped Tuesday in its place, thereby adjusting the total. Under these conditions, of course, the connecting seams af the days could not fit together properly, and cracks appeared in the time."

The first entry of the first (Christian) book (a similar entry appears at or near the beginning of the other two books as well) is Ateh, the Khazar princess and protectress of the cult of dream hunters. It Is her immortal, shape-shifting and surreal spirit that presides over what is said to be, at least in its origins, her dictionary. She is a poet, a teacher, a counselor, a magician, a succubus of sorts, a seditionist and a kind of Zen master for whom all truths of this world are self-canceling, that cancellation being the closest one gets to universal truth.

The original dictionary, said to have been put together by Princess Ateh and her lover. the leg- endary Mokaddasa AI-Safer. greatest of the dream hunters (he was able "to tame fish in people's dreams, to open doors in people's visions, to dive deeper into dreams than anyone before him") was supposedly a compilation of the experiences of the dream hunters, who, drawing on old folk motifs for their whimsical methodology, were (and are) essentially mystical seekers after poetic truth. the only kind of truth that survives Mr. Pavic's gentle mockery. History, scholarship, philoSophy, religion, virtually all forms of learning and remembering (all "dictionaries") are ridiculed, dissolved into the dream of the sleeping, primordial giant Adam-before-Adam (Adam Cadmon, Adam Ruhani), whose body contains the universe and who "thought the way we dream."

The goal of the dream hunters is to "plunge into other people's dreams and sleep and from them extract little pieces of Adam-the-precursor's being, composing them into a whole, into so-called Khazar dictionaries, with the aim of having all these assembled books incarnate on earth the enormous body of Adam Ruhani" - an unlikely achievement, since Mokaddasa AI-Safer himself only managed to shape a single strand of his hair. Besides, as the devil himself warns, it is a monally dangerous vocation, and the reconstructed Adam may turn out, alas, to be a monster.

The religious disputants at the Khazar polemic are also called dream hunters and dream readers, and so are credited with good Intentions even while their arguments are reduced to the vaporous substance of dreams (the dream they have been called upon to interpret in the Khazar polemic centers on an angel's declaration to the dreaming ruler: "The Creator is pleased with your intentions but not with your deeds"). And, like the other "students of the Khazar question" chronicled here, the readers of this book become, ipso facto, initiates into Princess Ateh's dream-hunting cult, invited "to leave your reponse and additions to the Khazar dictionary where all successful dream hunters leave theirs." "It is an open book," Mr. Pavic tells us in the preliminary notes, "and when it is shut It can be added to: just as it has its own former and present lexicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers, and continuers."

Which may well happen. This spatializing of the narrative time line, offering the reader a multitude of branching paths in place of the inalterable paginated sequence, with its tantalizing life-after-death illusion of an inexhaustible unending text, has a great appeal right now among computer-bewitched humanists.

Since the computer radical and prophet Ted Nelson first invented the word "hypertext" to describe such computer-driven nonsequential writing nearly a quarter of a century ago, there has been a steady, now rapid, groWth of disciples to this newest sect of dream hunters. A new kind of coverless, interactive, expandable "book" is now being written; there are no doubt several out there in hyperspace right now; and "Dictionary of the Khazars" could easily take its place among them as inspired hackers, imitating Mr. Pavic's Father Theoctist Nikolsky, gleeful inventor of saints' lives, add their own entries, helping to fashion Adam Cadmon's body. If perhaps not a classic, it could yet become one, a new literary game as popular, say, as Dungeons and Dragons, new Khazar dictionaries rising, as did the first, "like yeast around the princess's collection."

For all its delights, for all the structural novelty and the comic inventiveness of the imagery, it must be said there is something rather light and airy about this book. It is fun to chase down all the linkages between entries; but as they are conjoined more by the bubbling repetition of motifs and the requirements of the formal devices than by real narrative event or development, it is, as Mr. Pavic himself suggests, a bit like working a crossword puzzle. Or, as though Princess Ateh were setting us exercises, like deciphering dreams, which are also known less for sustained story lines and substance than for their signifying structure and vivid surface. When we first meet Ateh, she is preparing for bed by decorating her eyelids with letters that kill as soon as they are read, and so protect her in her sleep. Thus we enter the book as though going to sleep, our lids sealed with letters, and, though Ateh's own dreams, except for a brief dream-hunting adventure or two, are not recorded, it is as if this entire dictionary might be no more than a collage of her dreams, provoked by associations generated in part by this opening passage. The motif of letters with magical properties, for example, is threaded throughout the book, as are many other themes and motifs that appear in this short entry- salt, mirrors, metamorphosis, dream hunters, eyes, the Khazar polemic and dictionary, indeterminacy. doubles, translation, alternate stories, the varieties of time - anyone of which could have an entry, or entries, of its own.

"Eyes," for example: Ateh's eyes here are sliver, but others are "like two shallow dishes 0f onion soup," "as hairy as testicles," "like yellow grapes whose seeds showed through," "the color of damp sand," "the shape of eggs," "like two small blue fish," "like two trampled puddles," "like the wasps that transmit the holy fire: one eye masculine, one eye feminine, and each with a sting." There are eyes that drip colors into paints, others that can spell a name in the air and light a candle or swallow a soaring bird. Yet another character has breasts with eyelashes and eyebrows that "dripped a dark milk like a threatening glance."

These images are not developed or repeated, and some of them may apply, contradictorily, to the same person or be shared by dilferent persons. They exist of and for themselves, for their moment on the page, and often the most stunning ones are one-liners applied to characters who seem to have no other purpose for being in the text than to exhibit the image. There is the pasha Mustaj-Beg Sabljak, for example, who "had a large, irregular build, as though he wore his skin over his clothes, and a turban between his hair and his skull." Or the little girl displayed naked, who "suffered from an unusual disease: her left hand was faster than her right. She claimed her left hand was so fast that it would die before she did: 'I'll never be buried with my left hand I I can already see it lying without me in a small grave, without a marker or a name, like a ship without a rudder'" Or the anonymous Slavs "who had bearded souls and in winter carried birds inside their shirts to keep warm," or "the tribes that whip the wind, grow grass on their heads instead of hair, and have icy thoughts." These latter are visited by a tattooed Khazar envoy, carrying his nation's history and topography on his body, who "ended his life at the court of some caliph by turning his soul inside out and slipping it on like an inverted glove."

If all of this is, as Mr. Pavic suggests, "something like a feast eaten in a dream," it Is a feast for all that, and, faithful to his notion that all books are dreams and readers are dream hunters, an ebullient and generous celebration of the reading experience. His characters imitate those metaphysicians or Borges's Tlon, who "do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude. but rather for the astounding." I cannot read the Serbo-Croatian original and so am not the best judge, but, as all the above irresistible quotations should attest, Christina Priblcevic-Zorlc's translation seems quite stunningly brilliant. It has a freshness, a sparkle, a delicacy and economy of phrasing reminiscent of that given to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gregory Rahassa, or William Weaver's splendid translations of Italo Calvino.