In the mid-1930s, two Harvard scholars — Milman Parry and Albert Lord — travelled to Yugoslavia to record the Balkan guslar poets, some of the last practitioners of the central European oral epic tradition. Two and a half decades later, in a book called The Singer of Tales, Lord systematised their findings into a set of theories about oral epic poetry, and formulated the famous Parry-Lord hypothesis: that Homer’s The Iliad had begun life as an oral poem. Homer himself was not an individual person, but a collective of bards working within a fluid tradition of oral poetry, where every performance of The Iliad was akin to a fresh composition. Through their work, Parry and Lord displaced some of the most long-standing assumptions about written and oral forms and the origins of epic poetry.
In 1981, the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare wrote a novel called The File on H. In The File on H, two Irish-American scholars from Harvard journey to the Albanian Highlands, seeking to solve “the Homeric Question” by recording some of the last surviving Albanian epic poets. They carry with them newly-invented recording technology. But their quest proves to be anything but simple. It turns out that the two scholars have landed right into the heart of a long-standing dispute between the Albanians and the Serbs. “They had quarrelled over everything,” Kadare writes, in the style so typical of him. “Over land, over boundaries, over pastures and watering holes, and it would have been entirely unsurprising had they also disputed the ownership of local rainbows. And as if that were not enough, they were also squabbling over the ancient epics which existed, just to make things completely intractable, in both languages, Albanian and Serbo-Croatian. Each of the two people asserted that it had created the epic, leaving the other nation the choice of being considered either a thief or a mere imitator.”
Walling up voices
But that is not all: as they find themselves beset by incompetent spies, intractable government officials, and sceptical locals, the scholars begin to have doubts about their own project.
While they begin with a triumphalist belief that they are helping salvage a dying tradition for posterity, they soon start wondering if the very act of recording is, in one sense, an act of mutilation. “This machine walls up the ancient songs,” they’re told, “imprisons them within itself, and you know as well as I do what happens to a song when you wall up its voice.” After all, if oral epics “could only ever exist in the scattered form in which they found it … they there were betraying and altering their material by trying to put its pieces together.” The File on H does not answer the many questions it raises, although its final, shattering denouement hints at their unanswerability.
The File on H is one outstanding example of the work of Ismail Kadare, who passed away on July 1 at 88.
It takes as its basis a real-life narrative — Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s actual trip to the Balkans — and weaves out of it a story about epic poetry and the construction of nationalism, the many faces of authoritarianism, the disruption of the outsider’s gaze, the pathologies of modernity, and so much more. These are themes that occur and recur in Kadare’s work.
Blood feuds and ‘kanun’
Perhaps his most famous novel, Broken April, also features two outsiders chancing upon a world whose rhythms and norms they are unprepared for — and which is unprepared for them: the generational blood-feuds of the Albanian highlands. The characters of Broken April act out the rules of the blood feud in accordance with the kanun, a law that permits neither dissent nor questioning, but also structures and gives meaning to collective life. To outsiders, the kanun is either a romantic throwback to a purer past, a stubborn and anachronistic hold-out against modernity, or — to someone who comes to know one of its victims — a visceral horror: but each of these perspectives reveal more about the limited horizons of outsiders, rather than any immutable truth about the kanun.
In all of his work, Kadare — who came of age in the climate of Cold War censorship — was keenly aware of the power of myth in constructing an idea of nationhood, for better and for worse. The Siege portrays an Ottoman siege of an unnamed Albanian fortress, told from the alternating perspective of the Turks and (in brief, one-page interludes) of the besieged soldiers. The Siege features a stark — almost jarring — contrast between the brutality of war, and its deployment in building national narratives. A commander dies wanting “to have thought a sublime thought, but he could not.” A doctor bitterly reminds the Turkish chronicler to include the rats in his chronicle. But amidst the blood, stench, and ruin, even as he is engaged in a futile resistance, the Albanain leader Skanderberg, we are told, “is trying to create a second Albania, outside anyone’s reach, a kind of immaterial Albania. So that when one day this Albania, the terrestrial one, falls to the Empire, that other, ghostly Albania, its shadow-self, will go on wandering among the clouds.” A similar contrast between national myths and the violence that underlies them is offered in The Pyramid, an allegory set in ancient Egypt, about the construction of the great Pyramid of Cheops, and the human labour that went into it.
Intersecting strands
All these strands intersect and together constitute the theme that Kadare is perhaps most well-known for: the lucid and uncompromising anti-authoritarianism and anti-totalitarianism that defines his stories.
The most obvious example is The Palace of Dreams. Set in the 19th century Ottoman Empire, at the heart of the novel is the Tabir Sarrail, the Palace of Dreams, a mysterious, impenetrable and vitally important organ of the state, housed in a labyrinthine, inaccessible building, that is responsible for collecting, categorising and interpreting every dream that is dreamt by the inhabitants of the Empire. But when an interpretation of a dream gives the Empire a chance to finally attack a prominent once-Albanian clan that has long been a thorn in the Ottoman side, the stage is set for a complex, tragic reflection on national myths, political power, and language and dreaming.
These are only some of the examples of the rich and complex oeuvre that Kadare has left us. In a world that is beset by struggles over history, over mythic pasts, and over nationhood, in a world that Kadare memorably called “an orphanage for fallen stars,” his work has an ageless quality that every generation will have the privilege to discover and rediscover.
Gautam Bhatia is a Delhi-based lawyer.
