Does time have a gender? And to what extent is it possible at all to speak of male and female time? While the proponents of gender studies analyse which is the gender of our time, more traditional interpreters speak of time itself. This question should not be deprived of its feminist edge in order to highlight its metaphysical dimension. And vice versa. Nevertheless, one can and should move beyond écriture masculine and écriture féminine, beyond mere sex and gender in writing. It does not always have to be about the power that one sex has over the other, or the tragedy of their mutual relations. Can we, then, shift the issue of male or female time from the sphere of political power, or even that of a tragic misunderstanding, to the sphere of love and dialogue? The fact that the issues of gender and time play a key role in major novels by Milorad Pavić and Gabriel García Márquez should be more important than the fact that we chose the works of two male authors for our analysis.

With the publication of Milorad Pavić’s novel Dictionary of the Khazars, for the second time in a period spanning three decades, Serbian literature took an active part in the circulation of world literature and attained global popularity, even though cultural and literary dialogue had always been among its virtues.Reference Damrosch¹ That is why both national and foreign literary criticism sought answers to the mystery of Dictionary of the Khazars through comparisons with literary works from other cultural regions. The name of Milorad Pavić is often connected with that of Jorge Luis Borges. Critics have pointed out structural similarities in these writers’ opuses, first of all their erudite and encyclopaedic character, and a specific attitude towards myths or a mystification of authorship.Reference Delić² The impression that such comparisons to Borges produced, however, was so profound that it overshadowed or altogether obstructed the possibility of perceiving new, equally exciting similarities at the very heart of the Hispanic literary tradition.

Another great name in that Hispanic tradition, that of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, is encountered nowhere near as often when it comes to comparative investigations of Pavić’s novel, nor have critics perceived in the Colombian writer’s opus the ‘mirroring’ power (Goethe’s notion of Spiegelung, see Ref. Reference Damrosch1, p. 7) and the mutual reflection of cultural matrices that is characteristic of Borges’ work. Moreover, the primary role of the parallels drawn between Pavić and García Márquez has been to accentuate the fact that the works of the Serbian author can stand side by side with the works of world-renowned Latin American writers. The comparison of Pavić to García Márquez and to Borges have come from the ‘European perspective’ that often views the literature of South America through a homogenizing prism. Sufficient attention has not always been paid to the qualitative differences between the two great Spanish American authors.Reference Baščarević³

The focus of the research has been to quickly shift from a possibly genuine bond between the works of Pavić and García Márquez to other matters. In the terminological and poetical compendium of Pijanović’s book on Pavić, entitled ‘Poetical warehouse’, García Márquez appears as one of the ‘literary magicians’, a potential precursor of Pavić and an author who, more than Pavić, emphasizes the importance of vitality and sexuality in his work (Ref. Reference Delić2, Pijanović, pp. 349, 350, 379). A more detailed comparison of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Dictionary of the Khazars can be found in Kornelije Kvas and Sang Hun Kim.Reference Kim and Kvas⁴ The similarity between the two novels has been observed in the fact that both writers experience fiction as part of everyday life, that they use a mixture of superstition, rumour and exaggeration in their narration, and that the time in their novels is mythical.

A shift of emphasis in comparative interpretations is always indicative of a shift of the critical paradigm, the angle from which the opuses of the writers being compared are reviewed, in the course of which a different critical perspective is offered as the starting point for the questioning of the relationship between the cultural margin and the centre. Despite the risky nature of this comparison within the framework of the contemporary critical paradigm, and despite the lack of research into this field, or precisely because of it, it is necessary to emphasize the poetic similarity between Pavić’s novel and the work of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner. Making this choice, one should be guided by the specifics of the Spanish American literary realm and by representative examples.

Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez meet all the criteria of national and international literary value, while the comparison of Pavić with García Márquez takes into account the peculiarities of the Latin American literary environment. What fresh nuance, if any, when it comes to interpreting Dictionary of the Khazars, would a comparison to One Hundred Years of Solitude reveal, and would such a comparison perhaps yield a chance to view García Márquez’s masterpiece from a new angle? Especially in view of the fact that both writers distinguish between male and female in regard to text as well as time.

As is well known, the two different forms of Pavić’s novel, the male and the female variants, raise the issues of sexuality and text with the same power. Milorad Pavić himself, in his preface to the androgynous edition of the novel, explains that there exist two forms of the novel on account of the fact that the two sexes experience the world differently. A woman, Pavić points out, carries the world inside her, whereas men experience it outside themselves, in the cosmos.Reference Pavić⁵ Metaphorically speaking, the female image of the world is more emotional and sensual, capable of encompassing the world within itself, whereas men experience the world as a succession of transcendent questions and answers. The difference between the sexes when it comes to world-view leads to different ways of experiencing time. Or, as Pavić himself put it, men live in a collective, that is, social- and spiritual-historical time, while female time is individual and belongs more to the privacy of the subject.

Pavić insists on the existence of male and female texts, as well as male and female reading, in a number of entries of his novel-lexicon. Examples are numerous, and their enumeration would be tiresome if it did not reflect the very essence of the creative act and if it did not abound in surprising, even bizarre details. Thus, Pavić’s protagonist, Methodius of Thessalonica, an old monk, points to the fact that no book can reveal everything that is written in it. In a surprising reversal, those belonging to the male sign understand only the odd-numbered sentences of the text, whereas those belonging to the female sign understand even-numbered sentences (Ref. Reference García Márquez6, pp. 76–77). In the same mysterious tone, Father Teoctist Nikolsky reveals how female and male stories cannot have the same ending (Ref. Reference Pavić5, Idem, p. 249 – Appendix I, Father Teoctist Nikolsky as Compiler of the Khazar Dictionary’s first edition). The whole is rounded off by way of Pavić’s pondering on the creation of Dictionary of the Khazars in the same key, and it draws the line between genders that can blur their complementarity.

In keeping with post-modernist poetics, the entire Dictionary of the Khazars is presented as a reconstruction of the previously lost text of Daubmanus’s edition. The imaginary subtext of Dictionary of the Khazars constitutes the fate or paradigm of Pavić’s book and its protagonists. Princess Ateh and her lover Mokaddasa al-Safer wrote the first version of Dictionary of the Khazars together. Princess Ateh wrote the female part of the encyclopaedia, while Mokaddasa al-Safer wrote the male part (Ref. Reference Pavić5, p. 220). By writing their texts, entries in the encyclopaedia, Khazar dream hunters wished to recover the body of heavenly Adam. Female entries aimed to mark his body, whereas male entries aimed to mark his blood (Ref. Reference Pavić5, p. 257; Ref. Reference Lukavská7). Why, after all, is sexuality so significant in Pavić’s novel? What function, if any, can the insistence on gender have but to reconcile imposed differences? Only through contact between a woman and a man, through the text they are creating, only through love, does the story of the Khazars come together, and does Adam come alive.

García Márquez conceived One Hundred Years of Solitude in a traditional manner. We read – the way we are used to – one and the same edition intended for all readers, regardless of sex, but one particular element reveals that gender polarization – when it comes to text, writing and decoding – does occur in the novel. In his manuscript, the old nomad Melquíades does not merely reveal the fate of Macondo: Macondo’s fate is fulfilled when the manuscript’s final line is decoded.Reference García Márquez⁶ Still, it is only the men of the Buendía family who are trying to interpret Melquíades’ writings. The women of the Buendía family, first of all the matriarch Ursula Iguarán, do not consider such a form of diversion worthy of their time or attention.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, one can perceive a very similar, if not the same, distinction between male and female time as in Pavić’s novel. In García Márquez’s novel, as Eva Lukavská has pointed out,Reference Lukavská⁷ men are not aware of the present moment: they project themselves, their wishes and ideas into the future, while women, on account of the many spousal and motherly tasks that they dedicate themselves to, live solely in the present. The men of García Márquez find fulfilment outside themselves, in war campaigns, in strikes, in the interpretation of Melquíades’ writings, whereas his women find fulfilment inside themselves, through direct care of the family and its current well-being. It becomes clear that the nature of women’s lack of interest in Melquíades’ writings can be explained by the characteristics of female time, while men’s dedication to the text fits in with the male experience of the unfolding of events.

The differences in the perception of time depending on the sex of the protagonists of García Márquez’s novel are not negligible. To men, time remains static, directed towards a future that will never come, wherein lies the cause of their solitude and isolation. But it is only given to women to understand, owing to their focus on the present moment, the hidden law of the world of this novel – namely, that time actually moves cyclically.

The cyclical character of time in García Márquez’s novel becomes evident through the repetitions of many events, as well as characters.⁸ Men’s failures in wars and strikes are continually repeated, or their desire for interpreting Melquíades’ writings is continually renewed. In each generation of the Buendía family, the male names José Arcadio or Aureliano, as well as the female names Ursula, Amaranta or Remedios, appear in one form or another, which intensifies the sense of the circular movement of time. The characters who share the same name also share certain characteristics, so that, for example, Ursulas are women possessing a strong character, Aurelianos are introverted or possessed of a lucid mind, and each and every José Arcadio is impulsive and enterprising, but also marked by tragedy (Ref. Reference García Márquez6, p. 212).

The eternal circular movement of time in García Márquez’s novel is always a circular movement inside a tragedy, the impossibility of abandoning the tragedy of human fate and bridging the gap separating one man from another. The same kind of love, or to put it more precisely, erotic relations established anew among different generations of family members are marked by a sign of tragedy. Framed by incest and devoid of any deeper emotional touch, they testify more to the existence of a boundary between the sexes and between people, which cannot be crossed, than to true human intimacy. For García Márquez, repetition necessarily leads to tragedy. Repetition can testify to the closeness of epochs and people alike. Still, there may be a way out of the cyclical nature of the tragic fate foretold by García Márquez after all. A paradoxical way out, open to doubt, but no less attractive for that.

One of the irresistible charms of Pavić’s novel, traditionally interpreted as a Borgesian feature, is precisely the connection between events and characters that are repeated in different epochs. The desire to compile a Dictionary of the Khazars is manifest in a number of occasions in different historical periods, in the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, through a great number of the same characters. Princess Ateh participated in the creation of the first dictionary of the Khazars in the Middle Ages, and contributed to the search for it, conducted in the seventeenth century. In the twentieth century, her presence is felt through the character of the Khazar maid, Virginia Ateh. The encounter between the researcher, Avram Brankovich, and the demon, Nikon Sevast, dating from 1689, is repeated in 1982. Three demons from the seventeenth century meet again in the twentieth century in the same family. Sometimes we recognize them by bizarre details such as the lack of a nasal septum or two thumbs on the same hand.

Paradoxically, the final repetition that takes place in Dictionary of the Khazars actually occurs outside of it. Two lovers, Princess Ateh and Mokaddasa al-Safer, compiled the first Khazar books; at the end of the novel, the author invites contemporary readers to couple and thus conjoin the male and the female versions of Dictionary of the Khazars:

When lovers embrace, ‘sitting on their bicycles’, they will produce, as Pavić says, something ‘worth more than any reading’ (Ref. Reference Pavić5, p. 269). That which comes after the text fulfils the purpose of the two versions of Dictionary of the Khazars and symbolically conjoins the male and female italicized sentences.

It is logical to assume that the content of those sentences contains the definitive secret concerning the distinction between the male and the female principle, but Pavić yet again looks for an active reader who creates the meaning of the text with its author. We are referring to the moment when Abu Muawia hands over to Dorothea Schultz the photocopies of Cyril’s ‘Khazar Orations’, which he claims to have found. Both copies convey the event to us from Dorothea’s perspective. In the female copy, the whole episode takes an interesting turn. While Dorothea and Abu Muawia exchange manuscripts, their thumbs touch. Dorothea, overcome by more than a sensual touch, gets carried away by her feelings, incapable of focusing on the text as ‘centuries pass’. That touch feels to Dorothea like a powerful existential blow. After that, in her own words, Dorothea was never the same again.⁹

During the entire course of her career, Dorothea Schultz dealt with the issues of the Khazars and the Khazar polemic. And yet, at the moment when Abu Muawia hands her the sheets of paper that may contain the text she has been looking for all the time, Dorothea Schultz is unable to concentrate on the words she is reading. The power stemming from touching another human being, manifested in the touching of their thumbs, is so intense that it overshadows even intellectual curiosity. Perhaps Dorothea’s sensitivity hides not only a reason for a feminist deconstruction of gender stereotypes, but also Pavić’s deep message about love that is capable of erasing the boundaries between the sexes, subjects, immediate interests, and even the intractable boundaries between different eras.

In Pavić’s novel, a touching of thumbs always signifies creation or revival. The only passage that distinguishes the male from the female version of Pavić’s novel, speaks of the same, of the androgynous Adam who is the ultimate synthesis of gender and time. In the female version, the image of a touching of thumbs symbolically depicts the creation of the first man, whereas in the male version the androgynous Adam appears in Dorothea Schultz’s pondering of man as a tree stretching as much towards God, through its crown, as towards hell, through its roots. The modest touch of male and female bodies, of male and female versions of the text, is capable of creating the first and the subsequent man, Adam – that is to say, the origin and the purpose of man’s existence. The touch of two young people on a bicycle that is to follow, a touch of thumbs that is repeated through the centuries, can overpower history and time, can make up for the hollowness of the text, wherein there is always an insufficient amount of human warmth and intimacy, can reconcile the feuding sexes and turn them into one.

In Dictionary of the Khazars, a touch with the Other is, in fact, love so all-permeating that time ceases to exist. The future and the past meet in the fingers of Dorothea Schultz and Abu Muawi; centuries pass in a moment. It is at this moment that the reading of Dictionary of the Khazars comes to a close, irrespective of the order in which we read the entries it is composed of. It ends in a meeting of contemporary readers, a reuniting of Pavić’s male and female versions of Dictionary of the Khazars, the coming back to life of the body of Adam Ruhani in a new love. In Pavić’s novel, souls that touch do not have a sex.

One Hundred Years of Solitude ends in an entirely different manner. When Aureliano Babilonia manages to unravel the meaning of the last line of Melquíades’ writings, he discovers that at that very moment a terrible wind will wipe Macondo off the face of the earth:

At that moment, the Buendía tribe completed its one-hundredth year of solitude, following which it was doomed to perish. The novel ends at a moment when time ceases to exist, but contrary to Pavić’s timeless union in love it ends in an Apocalypse of sorts. Nothing could save the Buendía family from the fate that brought them solitude, for fear prevented them from loving, or they were born incapable of loving, as old Ursula Iguarán said of her sons.

The question was: male or female? Contrary to all preconceptions the question of exclusiveness of the sexes is not in itself important to Pavić, but has tragic consequences in García Márquez’s novel. One Hundred Years of Solitude, traditionally interpreted in the vitalistic key of fecundity, life and love, testifies to the fact that the mere urge for life is not enough to heal the world of loneliness and keep away the horror of death. Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, viewed as part of the intellectualist and erudite literary tradition, can be read, with equal justification, as an announcement of healing love.

Had it not been for a comparison between Milorad Pavić’s and García Márquez’s masterpieces, this tension between humanistic reconciliation and tragic exclusiveness might have been easily neglected. It is, possibly, precisely through this comparison, as a representative sample of a cultural dialogue, that we can find out what may await us if we do not accept that dialogue with an open heart. In the difference between the sexes and texts, in all likelihood, the choice will be between Pavić’s revitalizing love and its fateful lack, as is the case in García Márquez’s novel.