Roots

Two archeologists equipped with a cumbersome tape recorder arrive in a northern Albanian province in the 1930s. They have come to capture the recitations of the last few mountain bards, heirs of an oral epic tradition going back to Homer.

Their project sets off a series of paranoid janglings and clownish cross-purposes in a society as isolated then as it has been virtually ever since.

The Albanian legation in Washington advises the interior minister that the two men could be spies. The minister advises the provincial governor that they almost certainly are spies. He plans to win King Zog’s favor by blackmailing them into writing the royal biography, something that his Foreign Ministry rivals have failed to persuade any Western scholar to do.

The governor is furiously bent on catching them red-handed. The governor’s wife, Daisy, instantly imagines sex, though the repressed energy of her fantasy life is such that it blasts her past visions of ecstasy into visions of pregnancy, abortion and disgrace. The governor’s favorite secret agent, Dull, prepares to cap his career by eavesdropping on the two scholars from their attic, even though he knows no English.

Ismail Kadare begins “The File on H.” as Balkan farce, as satiric and absurd as something by the early Evelyn Waugh or Lawrence Durrell. The farce is sustained, with touches of comic nightmare, almost to the end. Yet this remarkable Albanian novelist has simply used a lighter-than-air conveyance to shift some of the somber political and literary themes he develops more gravely in “The Palace of Dreams,” “The Three-Arched Bridge” and “The Pyramid.”

The lunacy that ignites around the archeologists, Norton and Ross, as they escape the stifling gossip of the provincial capital and start work at an inn out in the country, is a blithe variation on Kadare’s vision of autocracy as self-destroying madness. A harsher note is provided by the Albanian minister in Washington.

He insists to the scholars that in the Iliad’s first line--”Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles”--the initial Greek word, “Menin,” is the Albanian word for resentment. “Which means that of the first three or four words of world literature, the first and unfortunately the bitterest is in Albanian. . . . Ha ha!” exults this corrosive figure as if clamping darkness down upon the dawn light of Western culture.

As they record the old epics, chanted by the rhapsodes, or bards, who pass the inn on their way from the mountains, Norton and Ross stir up other tremors. Some are picturesque, such as a peasant’s worry that the different poems will get mixed up in the tape box or that, if kept there, they will rust. Others are more dangerous: The whine of the tape starts a rumor that people’s voices are being tortured.

Finally, there is the rage of Balkan history. The age-old enmity between Albanians and Serbs, just across the border, is fueled by rival claims over which people was there first. A Serbian monk visits the scholars: Why, he asks politely, are they honoring the Albanian side by treating their rhapsodes, rather than the handful of Serb singers in Montenegro, as Homer’s descendants? He launches a circuitous rumor, and a mob breaks into the inn, smashes the tape machine and destroys the tapes.

“File” can be sketchy and seems hastily put together. Daisy is only a comic turn; so is a government agent who, sent from Tirana to take over the investigation, does little more than seduce her. Like the other characters, Norton and Ross are less resonant than the figures in Kadare’s best work--until the end, that is, when they come to startling life.

Even before, though, the literary theme that is “File’s” most distinctive achievement is woven into their speculations. Norton’s notebook describes what set the two off on their quest. Casting about for doctoral subjects, they heard a scholar speak of “the last forge” of the Homeric epic: the mountain people of the Albanian frontier. Norton, whose mission turns increasingly mystical, rejoices that the tape recorder has just become available, “as if subconsciously it had preexisted its own creation.”

His hope is to study not so much the poems of the rhapsodes as the way in which they elaborate them, repeat them, vary them, thus to achieve an insight into ways that Homer used and shaped earlier bardic recitations; to what degree, scholars do not know.

A prodigious power to remember is essential, of course, for reciting an epic that may be 6,000 lines long. Of more interest is forgetting, which obliges the rhapsode continually to invent and refresh his recitation and keep it alive. “Can a rhapsode exist without a capacity to forget?” Norton asks. Kadare poses the question for its deeper artistic and humane significance.

The rhapsodes stand in the main hall of the inn, surrounded by their friends. Each starts with the majekra, a primeval gesture of invocation: palm held to the temple, fingers fanned out and protruding like a cock’s comb above the head as if calling down the demiurge.

The scholars listen avidly for the slight changes that each rhapsode introduces when he repeats a poem--two or three lines out of several thousand. It is a tiny germination, a flicker of renewal in an art that is dying. The dying is evident. The last new subject matter was five lines inserted in a poem in 1913, a time of national disaster. Life has stopped nourishing the epics.

Norton and Ross depart, their work in ruins. “Now the epic is scattered again, just as it was before,” Norton bitterly remarks. He has been losing his eyesight, furthermore, and on the ferry to Italy he goes blind.

The blindness has the last word. Ross picks up an Albanian newspaper and reads an account of their disastrous adventure. It is followed by a poem using the traditional rhetoric:

A black aprath [apparatus] rose from the waves.

Some said it came for our good.

It will only bring grief, said the others.

Some said it brings frozen nightingales to life. . . .

Suddenly Norton leaps to his feet, all but visibly swelling. He claps a hand to his head in the majekra and repeats the lines in guttural monotone, “making them seem to come from far away in time and space.” For that moment he is a blind Homer, invoking a living story in its bardic form, putting his stamp on it, asserting that the epic still has its work to do.

By anyone else, the climax would be willfully melodramatic. Perhaps through his buoyant mastery of darkness, Kadare makes it somber and disturbing. Ross, watching his friend, gets the last lines, and they purge melodrama into something more ancient:

“The word death crossed his mind twice over, but strangely it now seemed devoid of any significance. It was only a shell that encased something else.”