Ivan Demitrius Kafallo

Ivan Demitrius Kafallo was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, fled communism to meet his pen pal of four years whom he'd never seen in person, and settled in Los Angeles to write Profane Chronicles, his autobiographical novel which was critically acclaimed and sold internationally. Mr Kafallo has since worked in the film industry writing screenplays, short stories and poems.

His new, eagerly anticipated novel, The Darkly Glamorous Menace, is already stirring heaps of controversy here and in Europe; it is (in the words of Maurice Blanchot) "radical literature for the literary intellectual" in language (a 30-page lexicon accompanies the book), in style, and in graphic sex, laced with outrageously provocative revelations about man/woman polarity, forging roads untraveled and immortalizing truths hitherto not spoken. All of which confirms Mr Kafallo as a troubadour of the undepicted and the unsung! This book of mine, he tells in an interview, has not been manufactured; it has been garnered!—a statement he expounds by quoting who else but Blanchot: "Before it is achieved it is an indispensable means; once achieved it is an insuperable obstacle. The traditional concept, inherited from the cabala, according to which our downfall is our salvation and vice versa, may explain why art can succeed where understanding fails… Thus art is the place of anxiety and of self-confidence, of dissatisfaction and of assertion. It bears a name: self-destruction, infinite disintegration. And a further name: happiness and eternal life."

Excerpt from an interview with the author:

WEXFORD & BARROW: Your new novel The Darkly Glamorous Menace reads like a sacred book that shines fragmentarily with the wisdom of an ancient tradition transmitted through the ages and preserved for the initiate. Novalis said that the folly to which all sane men aspire in order to be whole is to write a Bible. Is this your Bible?

IVAN DEMITRIUS KAFALLO: Nothing about this book was preplanned and deliberate, just as certain episodes of one’s life happen unforeseen and uninvited. It all came together gradually and inevitably. I did not manufacture it, I garnered it. I must have been writing this book, without knowing it, for years. Just look at the stack of notebooks I’ve kept.

W&B: Hence, the plethora of references from movies, writers and also from philosophers going back to ancient times. At times, especially when you “reveal” some outrageous “secrets” about women, your protagonist sounds like a Zarathustra who purportedly speaks the pure unadulterated truth.

IDK: The truth, if I may say, as my protagonist sees it—

W&B: And related to the reader secondhand by a narrator who is, like in Moby Dick, not your protagonist. So that you, the author, are twice removed and any excesses should not be attributed to you, right?

IDK: (smiling) Yes, now that you’ve framed it that way.

W&B: If I may quote from your book: “Taking advantage of his thirst to pair, she’s crocheting endless lengths of intricate lace, weaving and wangling to get her way, molding the man like clay pottery.” There are pages upon pages of these “insights” about women. Here’s another one: “When she cuts affection off, as if affection were a spigot she could turn on and off, he’s left with the essential, i.e. sex. For the penis, knowing nothing of affection, only how snug the vagina fits, copulation becomes the only intimate contact between the husband and the wife and synonymous with affection. So much so that even when he doesn’t get laid, he’s been conditioned not to ask for sex, but to say: ‘I am starved. You’re not giving me affection.’” And this example is innocuous compared to others that can only be read, not spoken... so outrageous and so offensive that women will be gunning for... your protagonist. It’s difficult to imagine that this is the sort of recognition you want.

IDK: For some of us who desperately want recognition, notoriety being the closest relative of Fame would be welcomed.

W&B: Raw, untamed words are hurled on the page like stabs and strokes of paint in a Pollock canvas. Why use vocabulary which is for most of us inaccessible? Some would call it pretentious.

IDK: I subscribe to Georges Bataille’s Theory of Excess, offering to the reader my own flow of knowledge infused with rebellion and radicalism, both of which are necessary for any art to be taken to the extreme. Only by postulating the impossible does an artist achieve the possible, says Goethe. Art is always ahead of acquired forms of culture—post-culture, to the uninitiated. Restraint, clinging to a safe world where everything is clear and self-evident is what prevents a writer from entering that zone of the exclusive extreme where his work becomes timeless. I know I sound like Serge, my protagonist. But take Dali, for example... spurts of wild ecstasy rooted in profound inner despair, desperate because it is uncompromising, as if in a pact with the devil. What a pity that the devil should have all the best tunes!

W&B: Some will say that if language reigns supreme over plot and character, you have a novel that has a disturbing tendency to split at the seams and crumble into fragmentation.

IDK: Ah, but fragmentation used creatively. By dividing the fragments into smaller and smaller components, distinct and disassociated truths emerge. A sort of inborn knowledge. Plot is by definition art that’s preprogrammed and as such tends to lack spontaneity and fails to shake up the foundations of culture and to dispel our dreams of peace and security. Fragmented writing enables one to perceive at once the difference between artistic and cultural demands. Fragmented writing is basic, with no feeble transitions between strong elements. Fragmented writing introduces an allegorical dimension. Fragmented writing is the ordeal of pure thought trying to free itself from the tyranny of plot. Absence of plot makes the writer completely and, I might add, dangerously free. De Sade comes to mind. There you have no concessions to accepted forms of behavior. His perversity is hard and uncompromising, thus assuring an uninterrupted flow of past into present, and frees him from having to seek some lofty telos or try to untangle antimonies.

W&B: There is plot in your novel though... and even linear at times.

IDK: I offer plot only as a kind gesture to the traditional novel’s constraints. I dread commonplace dialogue instead of discussion. Prose that reads like poetry is what I am after. Poetry, said Malarmé, is the word’s supreme complement; it compensates philosophically for the penury of language.

W&B: In The Menace, by using different narrative voices, you utilize both the “I” and the “He” quite efficiently and effortlessly. Sometimes within the same narrative. Was this switching prompted from a need in you that you must have the best of both worlds?

IDK: In his diaries Kafka tells how he suddenly discovered literature when he was able to replace “I” by “He.” To me the same thing happened with my autobiographical novel Profane Chronicles. I had originally written it in the first person, but on the urging of my editor I reluctantly replaced the “I’ with “He.” What a difference this made! The narrative retained its intimacy and immediacy, while allowing me, the author, to distance myself from my own story and become no longer myself, no longer anybody, but an indifferent observer. In The Menace, where I was not constrained as much by a plot, I felt wickedly free and the switching from “I” to “He” and back again reflects that freedom and confidence. Here, the writer, twice removed from his protagonist, revels as much as his narrator and his protagonist in his own relentless pursuit for nourishment which includes all the elements from the dirtiest to the purest. ❑