This article describes the metaphorical identification of genealogy and language that is central to Danilo Kiš’s overarching project. In The Family Cycle and “The Encyclopedia of the Dead,” the documentation of history and the continuity of generations are worked into a single figurative system. This system has three major functions. First, children and texts complexly interact in the larger endeavor to preserve traces of the fragile past into an uncertain future. Second, the compulsion to identify with dead generations dramatizes the attractions and dangers inherent in fiction—overidentification with a character that overwhelms the reader’s or writer’s personality on the one hand, promiscuous dissolution into a world of metaphor on the other. Finally, genealogical figures form a metapoetic level that mirrors and focuses interpretation of the literary text. Notably, the dialectic between narrative and genealogy illuminates the hermeneutic circle in which finite texts appear as fragmented miniatures of some universal text, a book of nature or a “whole life.”
