What is the value of reading & thinking about reversible novels?

The only answer to the question I pose in the title is that it loosens our assumptions and perceptions, making our world richer, subtler, and more nuanced. In a variety of ways we can join with others interested in this stuff, helping to create a culture of greater richness and subtlety, hopefully one less easily controlled. It's not surprising that the artists, especially the experimental artists, and the intellectuals are among the first rounded up by abject dictators.

That's the value: it insists on the complexity and richness of life. And this is a threat to dictators who need to keep things simple.

Pavic on "reversible" and "nonreversible" art

"Long ago I came to understand that the arts are "reversible and nonreversible." Some arts are reversible and enable the recipient to approach the work from various sides, or even to go around it and have a good look at it, changing the spot of the perspective, and the direction of his looking at it according to his own preference, as is the case with architecture, sculpture, or painting. Other, nonreversible arts, such as music and literature, look like one-way roads on which everything moves from the beginning to the end, from birth to death. I have always wished to make literature, whish is a nonreversible art, a reversible one. Therefore, my novels have no end in the classical meaning of the word."

This is perhaps the key paragraph in Pavic's aesthetic. And it is far reaching. He sees the end of the 20th-century and the beginning of the 21st as not the end of the novel but the end of reading as we have known it. In a way, he preceded the computer, yet anticipated it. I believe it was Lance Olsen who said that Dictionary of the Khazars was the first book of the 21st century.

But if a book has no definite end, don't we have some sort of anarchy? Doesn't every reader approach it in a different way? Yes and no.

Think of a sculpture. Yes, every viewer's walk around a sculpture is unique, but that does not mean that there is not some sense of a whole that remains fairly consistent. The philosopher Edmund Husserl famously pointed out that when we didn't see a side of a box, we knew it was there, and that this knowledge seemed to precede some sort of empirical learning. It is just how we are.

If this sense transfers to Pavic's reversible novels, they will hold together, just in a different manner from nonreversible ones. They will hold together as a concatenation of events rather than a string of events. Neither is more "true" than the other.

What's more, let's face it, with nonreversible literary novels we often remember stuff that has little to do with their nonreversible quality. We remember a line. An image. A character's name or face or description. What's more, we remember a world or many worlds created by the author, worlds that, to a degree, hung together, and not solely because of a linear plot. In fact, in literary fiction the plot is often the least important part.

Not true with a mystery or a horror novel. A lot of science fiction is more about the building of a world than a linear plot, but a plot often shows up there as well.

Reading Pavic novels feels like doing a puzzle where there is no last piece. And its a delightful frustration.

Pavic-TWO VERSIONS OF DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS

There are, literally, two different versions of this novel. The male version and the female version differ by a fairly short paragraph. And the paragraph is not all that different. They both make sense relative to the paragraph above and below, which are identical.

This is a book that is blocks of text. After an introduction, the next three sections, which correspond to the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian sources on the question of the Khazar's conversion to Judaism, can be read in any order. We may read these huge blocks of texts in any order we want. Then, apparently, the appendices and closing note we read last.

But, maybe not. In the end is a list of main characters. We can trace each one as they appear in each of the main sections, and that, too, is a way of blocking.

This book demands a read and a rereading. And maybe more. We must enter and exit in different places, come to inhabit it. It is true that we come to inhabit most good novels, but with them a literary convention pulls us through: we start at page one and end at the last page of the book.

Here, the only way to come to inhabit the book is to give that up, to inhabit it at different angles, and other ones. To enter many doors. To leave through many others.