I have no desire to address the topic of death, although the mere mention of it immediately creates a sense of tragedy and echoes the gravity of myth, both of which are important for establishing the concept of paradeigma. Inquiries into death are unpleasant, particularly in the lands of the former Yugoslavia, but in spite of these unfortunate historical circumstances, it seems necessary to stay in the realm of tragedy and myth to create and recognize the new paradigm. Humanism can arise after any death, in any era, but the truth that the paradeigma of humanism was born in the epic poem that reveals the power of the literary imagination should not be forgotten. Literary imagination paves the way for humanism, and this has not changed even until our era of postmodernism and so-called posthumanism, if there is any such thing.

I intend to deal with the mythological content of paradeigma in Homer and to suggest the possibility of building a new cultural paradigm upon it, and then to point out how one of the most important Serbian writers contributed to this new paradigm. Basically, the situation that I refer to is that death has already occurred, but life goes on and there is no contraction of time leading up to eschaton. There is only a contraction of form and the knowledge hidden in it. What constitutes the paradeigma makes literary imagination most effective and reveals the truth of literature. This revelation requires the concept of operational time, different from Agamben’s brilliant messianic formula of ‘operational time’ or ‘the time it takes for time to come to an end’, stretched from resurrection to salvation.Reference Agamben¹ Literary form as such, from the very beginning of a work of literature, is delineated by an ending to come, as has been well-known from Walter Benjamin to Umberto Eco and Frank Kermode. Agamben could therefore consider any literary form to be a promise of salvation coming at its end. The form of literature is messianic and always fulfils its promise, bringing about the closure of literary imagination at the very beginning of fiction. Even Kant would be satisfied with this sense of promise in the form of literature.

It is in many ways striking that contemporary philosophy has developed a renewed interest in Saint Paul’s apostolic legacy, in which we can find three pillars and an arch that extends from resurrection to salvation – faith, hope and love. The outcomes of radical interpretations of such distant and unrelated issues as St. Paul’s conversion to Christianity as a decisive event of revolutionary history (Badiou), and the creation of rhyme in Christianity that so radically alters the meaning of literary form (Agamben), suggest the possibility of recuperating cultural history in poetics. That will help us introduce the idea of postpoetics, based on the paradigm of existence in literature.

But how could we possibly approach the issue of postpoetics when we do not really know what it means to be and stay alive in the true sense of the word nor do we know how to perceive the state of being alive in literature? History has failed us in terms of revealing the notion of a fulfilled human existence. Because of that, our reading is superficial, artificial, unconvincing, and even the most vivid literary creations are perceived as words written on paper. Besides missing the existential and postpoetic mode in writing, we have been lacking a paradigm of the present in our understanding of the past, and the paradeigma for understanding the present in reading. All our paradigms turn towards the past that casts its shadow on the present, even the world created in a literary work is usually perceived as the imaginary past of what has been written. The past is called upon in order to make sense of the present, as if an ultimately new paradigm could always be found in the past. Therefore, the task is to create a paradigm of the present, but strangely enough, the paradeigma found in Homer is already a paradeigma of the present. It would appear that a new paradigm was already established at the dawn of literature.

The basic meaning of the paradigm is actually the past for the present, it reads almost as a proper definition. The formation of and mental procedure involved in the paradigm relied on an example taken from the past, preferably a mythological one. But if we turn to what is practically the first exemplum of paradeigma in Homer, it surprisingly reveals that the present needs to shape the figure of the past, not vice versa.

The quest for a new paradigm begins where we find the first famous examples of paradeigma, and these are found in the story of Meleagar, which shapes the claim for Achilles’ involvement in the Trojan War and Achilles’ food offering to Priam in the last book of the Iliad. The latter is the most famous paradeigma, always quoted in any definition of paradigm. But we do not remember Achilles as a philosopher who faces death, nor does his skilful preparation of food at the Iliad’s ending remind us of a symposium, or evoke Socrates’ last supper. By doing so we may have created a more profound paradeigma for the history of consciousness, but who dares to turn Achilles’ reasoning into a model of philosophy? At the same time, he is unquestionably a model of a poet and writer.

Achilles dining with Priam is a remote introduction to the era of philosophical feast and colloquia, and connects the era of heroes and heroic salvation in a noble contest with the times of philosophical salvation in thinking and religious salvation in faith. The comparison of late and last suppers might seem accidental, but it can attract our attention, or alert us to the lack of it in scepticism – there are no feasts in Diogenes or Schopenhauer. Still, Achilles developed an argument, almost a practical philosophy that, even when faced with the utmost grief and the tragedy of a heroic life, one should go on, first eat and then be allowed to devote a proper period of time to burial and mourning. What is more surprising is that Achilles, in persuading Priam to eat, acts like a poet who transforms a mythical tragedy for the purpose of the present need, out of interest in the wellbeing of the defeated enemy and the truth of life. If his words are not interpreted as a white lie in psychological terms, or restricted to persuasiveness, then Achilles was entrusted with the Homeric virtue of poetic creativity. Only the taboo of heroism and the prevailing effect of death discourage us before we realize the ingenious Homeric transfiguration of a hero into a poet.

Even if Achilles as a proto-philosopher and his exemplum of a warrior’s grace and humility as a proto-symposium are debatable claims, Achilles’ interpretation of an old myth in the core of the first famous paradeigma is poetic. Before we turn to it, we have to bear in mind the most unpleasant fact – Hector’s death, and ask who can speak on behalf of the dead. In our time, there is no father coming to rescue a dead body for the sake of performing a ritual. It is not the dead themselves who have ever needed the ritual of a burial, but in our time there are no more grounds for claiming the body and performing the ritual. The killing of a soldier is legitimized, while death has become so distant that it does not require the presence of a corpse.

It is easier not to reflect upon the underlying silence in which Hector does not say anything, and upon the absent voices in literature. In the Odyssey, Homer brought back Achilles from the dead to say the most important thing – that life as such is more valuable than any kind of heroic death – but how come there was nothing for Hector to say? Is there something in literary culture that forbids him to speak?

This might be the very limit of the literary imagination and of European humanistic culture. It is far beyond the reach of criticism concerning the prosopopeia. An era of rhetorical criticism and understanding of prosopopeia as a challenge to criticism has ended without exploring the silence of the dead. While prosopopeia brings the rhetorical voices of the absent, silent or dead, and nothing brings the absent voices themselves, paradeigma does not reflect on the past but on the present, and if read properly, it could be understood as the figure of real, not figurative presence. The real in creation (poiesis) is poetry itself, the most obvious conclusion that has troubled criticism for centuries. In an era of criticism much concerned with real politics, not figural presence, paradeigma might be the secret passage between the past of criticism and criticism of the future – postpoetic criticism that deals with literary creation in respect of Homer’s depiction of poetics that necessarily turns the main hero into a poet.

How did Achilles become the poet of an epic ending? Homer’s Achilles, as we all remember, in the last canto of the Iliad offered food to a bereaved father out of mercy, persuading Priam to eat before bringing his son’s dead body back to Troy for a proper burial. Homer makes the great Greek warrior turn the myth of Niobe, the tragic moment after she has lost all her children, into a new mythological exemplum of how to behave completely differently in such a tragic situation. Homer altered the myth to serve Achilles’s purpose of convincing Priam, and forced Achilles to make that alteration just as if he was a poet himself. His argument was that Niobe had suffered a greater loss but – here Achilles adds a new element to the old myth – ate while her children were lying dead; therefore, Achilles claims that Priam should do the same and have some food before he leaves and takes the corpse back to Troy. Myth was used creatively as a means of persuasion, since in the myth Niobe did not eat at all and just turned into stone. That was the mode of tragedy, and Nietzsche bluntly pointed out that we need tragedy to save us from being petrified if we lift the veil and look at the face of the truth. Numerous stories of heroes turning into stone are the ultimate tragedies that require relief in the form of tragic literature.

But Homer appoints Achilles to search for a new paradigm, and the literary form that he comes up with consists of paradeigma and the transfiguration of the epic hero. The old myth was altered and instead of showing what the tragedy is, the epic reveals the power of life that will change any old story to serve existential purposes – that is the paradeigma. If Achilles, in creating a new story out of an older one, does what a poet does, what else could he be but a poet? Transformation from the wrath of tumus, sorrow and humility into an act of poetry that comes last is something that our culture, unable to stop conflicts and abolish the moral high ground of contest, does not perceive. Therefore, we turn the epic into the literary mode of tragedy instead of transcending the epic and tragic proportions of life. When the epic reaches beyond an epic world, no one is safe. To put a stop to it, we need humanism and the existential power of literature, just as Homer needed to establish them and transform the hero into a poet. A rebirth of this is the basis of postpoetic criticism.

Achilles came closer to the profundity of truth by altering the subject matter of mythology, than by sticking to its tragic form: grief turned into stone is more monumental, but not as poetical as the birth of humanism and the transformation of a hero into a poet. The poet is the one who invents the reason for a new practice. In order to make the father of his mortal enemy eat some food after his son has been killed in the duel, Achilles forces an interpretation of a myth previously unknown to Greek literature. The simple truth of life is that those who survive have to eat no matter how deep their sorrow. The stupidity and truthism of this truth contradicts all poetic, particularly tragic purposes. But the truth of poetry is something else, namely, the creativity of interpretation and striving for a greater truth, rather than a simple observation stating the obvious. If we were to be pleased with the obvious, why create such a complicated form like poetry to convey the same? But the basic things of life do not have to be denounced in order to reach the level of the symbolic – great literature brings together and melds the truths of life and the truth of literature. This corealism is made possible only if Achilles turns into a poet; therefore, this is not an achievement in the realm of mimesis, but of autopoiesis, where Homer shows what literature does. Literature reveals its principles right in front of our eyes, and ears too, in order to convince the reader, just like Priam, that life goes on and that a tragedy is not everything, even if a greater tragedy is just about to occur. Troy will fall, but the force of creation, poetry itself, will remain triumphant. The triumph of life in poetics, not only a representation of life, constitutes a challenge for postpoetic criticism. Revealing the strategies of literature, therefore, is not a question of poetic techniques, except if we understand them as Foucault’s episteme. That reaches very, very far, but it is worth giving this a serious consideration: each and every literary strategy plays almost the same role as Foucault’s episteme.

Do we witness in Achilles’ turning into a poet a moment dangerous enough to remain obscured in critical debates, although it is right in front of our eyes? Since Odysseus or Ulysses is such a great storyteller in Homer’s other epic, does this mean that heroes can aspire to real greatness only if they, even for a moment, become poets? Through the centuries we have invented and reinvented so many different concepts, but have we ever realized this transformation. Is it because the transformation is not important at all, or the consequences are too important? In order to protect ourselves from giving up aggression, replacing it with the poetry of life, we keep a revelation dating back to antiquity hidden so well that no one can realize that poetic imagination, something that should not be limited to literature, creates the paradeigma of life. (We could refer to it as the biodeigma of literature.)

Do we suppress these concepts in literature because we favour tragedy and mythical violence over the poetry of life? In order to gain the confidence of a defeated enemy and the fathers of the dead, to make those who are victorious become more human, do tragedy and mythology need to be poetically reshaped? What do we need after wars – a cult of heroes or the Homeric transfiguration of a hero into a poet or a storyteller? It seems particularly disturbing that throughout history, and even today, we are not ready for the culture of Homeric transfiguration. If we understood it properly, the expectation might have arisen that not only do the heroes of the past but also the great ‘unheroes’ of the present need to turn poetic. That is an absolutely impossible transformation in our societies that are far from Homeric transfiguration.

Since it is probably the hardest transformation ever, we practically never reach a real reconciliation. We just persuade ourselves that conflicts are over while they remain buried only for a while. Even in the paradeigma of mercy and food offering, out of real interest in a bereaved old man who has lost what is most precious to him and is about to lose whatever is left, there is no paradeigma of reconciliation. Coming from the dead after Odysseus has invoked him, Achilles does not cry over Hector as he did over his young cousin and himself. If Hector had been able to come back to Troy with Priam and defend the city walls or to negotiate a truce, the history of mankind would have been so different. This way, what is left is the food offering, and our imagination that the symposium will make a difference in comparison to a burial feast. Entombment of dead thoughts during the symposium, even the one that we are dealing with right now, is a practice gentler than a confrontation with corpses. But the absence of sadness and grief, the hermeneutical imperialism and the absence of self-denial, while the dead are never given a voice, restrain us from going through the Homeric transformation. In regions troubled by recent wars, people should prepare and share food and poetry, instead of meeting around graves and debating history. Political power is not more important than poetic insights, but it takes time to equalize them, proving the importance of the history of criticism in which the Homeric transformation of the hero should probably have the most significant role. But we have never educated ourselves to the level of what has been available in literature since Homer.

There is another episode connected to food in Homer worth considering. In a famous essay, Huxley noted that Homer’s depiction of skilfully prepared food in the Odyssey is an example of the truth in literature that is beyond tragedy.Reference Huxley² He readily gives a lot of examples of literature truthful in this sense – from works by Proust, Lawrence, Gide, Kafka and Hemingway (he must have thought of himself too). Contrasting contemporary literature with that of the past in which tragedy prevails, Huxley refers to the episode in the Odyssey in which those who survived the sailing between Scylla and Charybdis reach the shore. The first thing they do is to start a fire and skilfully prepare some food. Only after having eaten do they continue to mourn their lost friends and finally fall asleep, exhausted. Huxley is saying that if Homer had made them weep first, that would only be tragic (or sentimental, but Huxley does not discuss that possibility because it is not as prominent as tragedy); in this way, Homer represented the immense power of literature to bring us closer to a greater truth, as Huxley observes. Huxley’s concept of truth relies heavily on real life experience, although the examples he finds in literature are by high modernist writers. The theme of food preparation, just like that of food offering, is peculiar, but it serves to establish the truth in literature. Achilles’s creative approach to mythology renders the truth of life in the truth of literature, and he did not desperately need Nietzsche to help him out.

Although Achilles’ food was equally well prepared, there is still another side to literary epistemology that is not based on a taste for the real, but on the non-mimetic and the poetic forces in the paradigm of creativity. This kind of paradigm does not stick to the empirical truth but to a rule of literature: invent what you need to make the story more convincing, that is sheer poetics. Everybody, even Niobe, has to succumb to the rule of literary creativity. She has to eat not because it is an empirical statement about those who are alive, but because the creative power of literary imagination can twist any old story to serve a new literary situation. The postpoetic truth and the new paradigm remained practically unrecognized. It is not a very comforting thought that the old paradeigma has always been quoted while its real meaning has never been discussed properly in terms of existential poetics that we see as the birth of postpoetics.

At this point, just for the sake of literary materialism, we could go through the long history of fictional meals, particularly the well-prepared ones, from scenes of burials and feasts to the weird metaphors of food created in contemporary fiction. But this is not a paper about fictional meals, there are enough books already on that subject, nor is this an investigation into postpoetics that should end with a satirical view of literary oddities. Skilfully prepared meals under most disturbing circumstances are a vehicle of the true joys of literature. That, and a lesson from the past stating that a Dardanian semi-demon of death, Achilles as a son of the Balkans, can turn into a poet of humanism, is what concerns us here. Strangely enough, we have never come across a figure of a merciful Achilles of the Balkans, a man in love with Briseida and Patroklos, although even as students we read at the University of Belgrade a magnificent treatise on the Homeric hero and the theme of love in the Iliad by Professor Milan Budimir, who was blind like Homer and yet saw further than his fellow critics. He argued that the Homeric epic is a poem of love and pointed out Achilles’s Dardanian descent, attributing the transfiguration to the Balkan awakening of humanism, since the Dardans were a pre-Greek tribe that inhabited the Balkan mountains.Reference Будимир³ And that is the heritage that Greeks, Serbs and Albanians could share without complicated debates. After all, presenting themselves as Dardanian descendants, and therefore maybe claiming the heritage of Achilles, they might invoke the paradeigma for new relations in the Balkans. After developing it, we might even pursue the issue of Hector’s absent voice. There is something to come even after postpoetics.

Our search for a new paradigm, that led us to the oldest paradeigma, must bring us also to the contemporary literary scene. Let us bring something newer from the Balkans to this academic table on which skilfully prepared food is served. Instead of some new semi-demon of death, we should turn to the Serbian writer Milorad Pavić. For a while he was a literary celebrity, his books were translated all over the world, well read and reviewed, but due to the ongoing civil wars and massacres, his fame and the success of his Dictionary of the Khazars Reference Pavić⁴ faded in the West, although he was honoured by having a statue erected in his honour next to those of Joyce and Pushkin right in the centre of Moscow. If his works last long enough to be read without political presuppositions and heavy prejudice, he might not be discredited as a demonic figure but credited for the triumph of imagination even in respect of the postpoetic paradigm, not only for religious tolerance as Hans Robert Jauss brilliantly pointed out in defending the book, if not the author.Reference Jauss⁵ The food offerings of his fiction have reached the metaphorical level of gargantuan excess. A proliferation of exquisite and impossible meals in his fiction also marks the prevalence of the present over the past. The food of the present is the checking point for the poetics, and Pavić’s works are a brilliant exemplum of the new paradigm.

But the figure of death is evoked in Pavić’s novel even before the reading starts, because prior to the inner title page for the ‘dictionary of dictionaries of the Khazar question’ (Ref. 4, p. 11), as the book is referred to, there is a note about the destiny of those readers who will never open the book. Pavić added the grave inscription intended for them: ‘Here lies the reader who will never open this book. He is here forever dead.’ (Ref. 4, p. 9) Each and every person, although all of them might have been readers, lies dead if he or she has not read the book (offering, for the first time in human history, a male and a female edition of [almost!] the same book should have made Dictionary of the Khazars an absolute champion of gender politics). But what does this mean? An outburst of Balkan pride turned into a rather harsh statement, or a necessary warning of what this book is about – about the disappearance of entire nations, about the religious debate that has caused the culture and the great symbolic heritage of the Khazars to fade out, and about everyone who has to undergo the transformation when ‘from the realm of hope, thoughts have moved to the realm of memory, and everything is over’ (Ref. 4, p. 268), to quote the Dictionary.

The book ends foreseeing the love of a ‘readeress’, a ‘lovely woman with the quick eyes and languid hair who, in reading this dictionary and running through her fear’, feels lonely, and compares the female and the male versions of the book to a reader, ‘a young man who, like her, has just been overcome with a feeling of loneliness’ (Ref. 4, pp. 268–269). That meeting ends in something ‘worth more than any reading’ (Ref. 4, p. 269). ‘I see’, writes Pavić in his ‘Closing note on the usefulness of this dictionary’, in the very last sentence of his lexicon novel, ‘how they lay their dinner out on top of the mailbox in the street and how they eat, embraced, sitting on their bicycles’ (Ref. 4, p. 269). (In the Serbian original, they sit on vélocipèdes, the French bicycles with a huge front wheel – which adds a touch of the charm of the past and an image reminiscent of old-time movies.Reference Павић⁶) The strange place for their dinner is not an oddity, it is related to the difference between the male and the female editions in the last letter of Dorothea Schultz, one of the characters in the novel, hinting that only when the difference is recognized and those who have achieved that recognition have fallen in love, is the letter deposited in the mailbox, and the novel, and the message, reach their destination. The last lines of all those letters written by Schultz (who is sentenced for murder), which she is sending to herself, speaks of death. Death is omnipresent in the novel, but the first sentence assures ‘the reader that he will not have to die if he reads this book’ (Ref. 4, p. 15). In order to achieve an adequate level of assurance, the lexicographer ‘proposes to strike a deal with his readers’ – ‘he will sit down to write these notes before supper, and the reader will take them to read after supper’ (Ref. 4, p. 15). From this supper at the beginning to the love dinner at the end, Pavić does not develop his usual intertextual relations (although the whole novel is completely soaked with intertextuality), but rather of intermurdereality. The major argument about dead readers, those who will not read Dictionary of the Khazars, is presented between those two meals. The contract between the lexicographer and the reader depends on the fate of love and the closing event that brings the female and male readers together around the mailbox.

So the form of this book, which consists of three dictionaries equipped with elaborate comments and philological paraphernalia of a high professional quality, is a remarkable figure of religious tolerance, since the truth is not attributed to a single source. Strangely enough, only a few years before the war in ex-Yugoslavia broke out, here was a book that, in terms of Jauss’s vision, surpasses all the famous examples from the history of tolerance in literature, from Halevi, Potocky and Lessing to the present. Pavić was a prominent figure in Serbian society, a professor of literary and cultural history, particularly of the eighteenth century, a poet and translator from Russian and French. He played the violin, smoked a pipe and kept two marvellous Russian greyhounds; he regularly attended fashion shows and dressed stylishly, like a postmodern dandy. His heart failed him while he was trying to walk using crutches, after an operation that he had undergone, because he refused, at the age of 80, to move around in a wheelchair. He thought that he did not have a biography but a bibliography, and claimed that he had been a writer for centuries – he added the family history of writers, sculptors and painters to his own. Yet, after the war broke out he said a few words that are not easy to understand, and he was never forgiven for them, although he was active in the opposition against the Serbian regime and was a member of the Crown Council. For just a few not particularly clever, though not really off-putting thoughts in an interview, he was occasionally portrayed almost like the Devil himself. But should a great book of world literature pay the same price?

We might at great length interpret the end of the ‘Closing note’, comparing it with the end of Miloš Crnjanski Migrations, one of the Serbian novels of the century (having been translated into French very late, the novel received the Best Book award in France),Reference Црњански⁷ or with the most prominent Serbian novelist of the end of the twentieth century, Goran Petrović, who turned the meeting of two readers and two editions into the major motif of a full-length novel (the French and Russian translations have also received awards, but an English translation is still lacking).Reference Petrović⁸ Alternatively, we could introduce a debate about Heidegger’s ‘Letter on humanism’,Reference Heidegger⁹ written when he was excluded from the University because of his pro-Fascist views in 1933, and was not allowed to teach, or refer to the debate conducted between Habermas and Sloterdijk, or we might prefer adopting Lacan’s vision of a letter that has to arrive at its address to the cheerful notion that the letter of humanism that Homer intended for us has already arrived so many times but has not yet been read existentially, as we require when introducing postpoetics. We might ask about the ridiculous contrast between the ending of Proust’s and Joyce’s masterpieces in respect of food, or show that Pavić’s meals in the context of death place his lexicon novel in a peculiar post-biblical perspective where the letter has been consumed. But all of that will not change the feeling that, from the time of Achilles, a son of the Balkans, and the paradeigma that he created by revealing that the hero must turn into a poet, to the time of the lexicon novel by Milorad Pavić, we have been striving for a new paradigm, that has been around for a long time. Instead of a triumphant religious source of truth, there is something else in the Dictionary of the Khazars – a powerful poetic extension of the old Homeric paradeigma for the new millennium. This constitutes a significant contribution to world literature that could be observed better and read with less prejudice if we developed postpoetics.