Baština (Jan 2012)
The truth of faith and the truth of doubt in the story 'Simon Miracle Worker' of Danilo Kiš
Abstract
The story 'Simon Miracle Worker', which opens the last Kiš's Collection of Stories, the Encyclopaedia of the Dead, contains 'the poetics of condensation', and together with it, a documentary procedure. The innovation is to be the entering of fantastic motives into documentary proposal. The most important element in the story is the flight of Simon Miracle Worker, which evokes the parallel with Ikar's flight, and symbolic flight of Kiš's famous hero E. C. - from the Freestone. In the second version, the road upstream was Heraclites like replaced by the road downstream. The plot of the story was taken from the Gnostic legend, but 'Simon Čaralac', and his conflict with the Apostle Peter was being mentioned in the Works of Saint Apostles. Unbeliever and Heretic, mage and hedonist, philosopher and poet, Simon wanted to try the forbidden fruit from the Wood of Knowledge. He is the Apostle of doubt, and his view of the world is always off-lined to the one of Christian's Apostles and believer. For him the God is 'tyrant', 'Woman is the urn of bliss', and from human 'dust' the only outcome is to be desert, symbol of non-researched spaces of spirit, Gnostic hunger for knowledge. Just in the context of Gnostic philosophy, doubt and waiver, and Spinoza's philosophy of causality, this story gets richer significances. Semantic context enlarges the comprehension of artistic text as palimpsest as well, so that writer's allusions to the heroes 'Heretics' from the own creative works (E. C. From Freestone, B. D. Neumann, and B. D. Novski from the Tomb for Boris Davidovič, Mendel Osipovič, that is Mandeljštam from the Encyclopaedia of the dead), and numerous works from world's literature - either in synchrony or in diachronic. By use of documents and quasi- documents, by testifying of the 'honest' and 'suspect' witnesses by stating of 'the second version' of the story, the writer using the semantics of the procedure itself shows that there is not the only unique Truth, so that each religion including each totalitarian regime (in Post-scriptum of the story an allusion to the Stalinism is being appeared) only one of the truth of this world. Thus, everything should be put into doubt except in the verity of the story itself, since only in it the existence of many truths is being allowed.
