Magris,symbolic spaces and European identity

In memory of Alexander Cockburn, 1941–2012

The ‘other’ within: a wonderful expression, which I think is both very evocative and constructively relational. Evocative because the ‘other’ could be made to refer to language, literature and criticism, as they all relate philosophically to ‘dianoia’, or inner dialogue, and discursive thought, as well as to the more literal interpretations of an ‘other’ opposed to a ‘self’, to the temporal/historical ‘selves’ or aspects of the ‘self’ that have so often been the almost obsessive focus of the modern/postmodern trends of post-Romantic culture. Its constructively relational aspect addresses the following question: can identity ever really be fixed, stationary, or, as is frequently assumed in postmodern identity politics, part of a game of competing ‘gated communities’ of individuality/identity competing for marketing attention, or is it intrinsically and foundationally part of the relation between individual and community, individual and society, from the sense of self-perception and evaluation, growth, to that of emulation, success, and acceptance by others, of sharing and including?

There are obviously many reasons why reflecting on Claudio Magris, both the man and the writer, are so relevant to a reflection and discussion of European identity.

Some of the most immediately evident are his personal origins: his growing up in the city of Trieste, a locus of the ‘other within’, on the borders between Italian, Balkan and Austro-Hungarian cultures, but also between Mediterranean and Central European cultures (between a Europe of seas and one of mountains, rivers and lakes), between Western and Eastern Europe, between Central and ‘peripheral’ Europe, and though some of that periphery is in many respects still peripheral, other parts of that geographic ‘periphery’ are actually the set of dominant Western European countries in the European Union (EU), that to some degree encircle Central Europe.

Within Italy this is a region home to German and Ladin-speaking linguistic minorities, but in recent decades also home to the political localistic and regionalistic fundamentalism of the ‘Lega Nord’, a political party built on cultural and historical cheap revisionism and a fawning pseudo-entrepreneurial self-glorification of economic successes, often built on the exploitation of minorities – recent immigrants who are part of the changes brought by ‘globalization’. So it is a region that raises once again many of the issues connected to Italian unification: the relations between North and South, the Italian majority and linguistic minorities, or in historical terms between statism and federalism (Cattaneo’s variety being just one of several).

In terms of ‘cultural geography’ Magris is one of several great Germanists Italy has produced in the last century, all of whom were located in or close to cities where he studied, and/or where the medium that is most closely associated with his less academic activities, the Corriere della Sera, is located: Cesare Cases in Turin, Franco Fortini in Milan (at least for a great portion of his later life) and Ladislao Mittner in Venice.

All three cities are located in the proximity of another great river, the Po, and in some ways are emblematic of the major external influences on Italian culture: Turin – city of Gobetti, Gramsci, Einaudi (the man as well as the publisher), Norberto Bobbio and Calvino, with its francophile and anglophile dominants, the city of industry, labour, unionism, politics, but also of ‘unity’ imposed from above, weaselled by diplomats by using the exploits of men of action (Cavour and Garibaldi, machination and idealism); Milan in which one could say both Austrian and French influences compete(d), currently the financial, business and fashion capital; and finally Venice and Trieste where the Austro-Hungarian, the German, the Slavic and the ‘oriental’ could be said to be more dominant, and a previous capital of trade with the ‘Orient’.

In terms of cultural background it is also important to remark how Magris is not only one of the great scholars of Austro-Hungarian culture and literature, but how one of Hungary’s most influential intellectuals, György Lukács, influenced all three of these major Germanists – Cases, ¹ Fortini ² and Magris ³ – in different ways at different times in their careers.

This approach to Italian culture and identity via German, Central European and Eastern European culture has also implied an ability, from a critical point of view, to view the more dominant romance, Paris- and France-oriented narratives of the national culture with somewhat more detachment. The confrontation with the classic–romantic shift, with ‘nihilism’, especially on the terrain of German and Austro-Hungarian cultures themselves, rather than (mainly) via the French derivatives, is also characteristic of Magris’s intellectual quest. One should remember that a number of thinkers in the Venice area, contemporaries of Magris, all dealt with these issues and with various aspects of these cultures: Massimo Cacciari, Manfredo Tafuri, Franco Rella and Leonardo Benevolo among others (several associated with the University of Venice’s School of Architecture). ⁴

What is noteworthy when addressing the issues of European identity is that, within the context of Mitteleuropa Magris has devoted comparatively little effort to the study of Swiss literature and culture (one minor exception being Adolf Muschg). For centuries Switzerland has been perhaps the most institutionally successful example of a non-bellicose cohabitation, and to some extent integration, of diverse European cultures (a point often made by a less well-known writer from the Ticino, Giovanni Orelli), but the bulk of Magris’s work has been devoted to Austro-Hungarian, German, Eastern European and Scandinavian literatures.

From this physical and biographical geography let me pass to the symbolic spaces, frontiers and sometimes territorial pretensions to possession, of cultures, literatures and their national and global evolutions.

Magris has quite frequently resorted to spatial terms when referring to literary works in his own production: Microcosmi (1997; Microcosms, 1999a) and Utopia e disincanto (1999b; ‘Utopia and Disenchantment’) just to name a couple. The importance of islands in his (auto)biography, in Alla cieca (2005; Blindly, 2010b), ⁵ or even ironically the fact that ‘The Self that Writes’ was given as an ‘Almost Island Dialogue’, are further indications of this connection between (natural) symbolic space (and landscape) and the world of values (utopia(s)). These spatial rhetorical figures often refer not to literature (or language) in isolation, but to its most basic intertwining with our sense of identity, self, place and the world. ⁶

I would argue that Magris’s gesturing towards these symbolic spaces represents an intermediate position between the more Enlightened, almost neo-Kantian, analysis of Ernst Cassirer in his The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1953) – a work quite closely associated with the legacy of Aby Warburg and his ‘obsession’ with the continuing influence of the classic into the present ⁷ – and the extremely rhetorical, late Romantic (in a most extreme meaning of the term, associated with a ‘secularized’ recycling of the religious in existentialism) allusion to the role of form in thought and art, and the (vanishing) border with the extremes of ‘nihilism’, namely Martin Heidegger’s Über die Linie ⁸ (1955), formulated in his discussion with Ernst Jünger. Magris, I would argue, remains in a humanist intermediate position, which is rationally more closely aligned with Cassirer, but perhaps emotionally tempted by the sirens of the latter position.

In the essay ‘Sempre verso casa’ (Magris, 2008a: 94–7; ‘Always towards home’), ⁹ which discusses Novalis, and the early German Romantic attempt to move beyond genres, Magris notes how many of the grand literary voyages of modernity, like that of Joyce’s Ulysses, end with a return home. Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen was also supposed to end with such a return, which

had to bring the entire universe back home with him – in that home of one’s birth which everyone, as Bloch will later say, nostalgically believes they see in childhood and which instead is to be found in a liberated future, in the voyage’s final destination. (Magris, 2008a: 95)

This search for ways to reduce the cosmos to more compressed symbolic spaces, while moving beyond previously established forms is what makes this early romanticism (and that of Friedrich Schlegel, for instance) the precursor of all later avant-garde movements. But this voyage is not only literary for Magris; it is also an excavation of and an attempt to discover (but also contain) the self, the Ego.

In another essay in the same collection titled ‘Ernesto Sábato e le due scritture’ (Magris, 2008a: 340–7; ‘Ernesto Sábato and the two forms of writing’), the creation of a literary work is again compared to the construction of a house, highlighting the opposition of the open and hidden spaces as equivalents for the rational and unconscious areas of our psyche:

In some cases writing also means to give voice, even without noticing, to those experiences that were not utilized and re-elaborated in the conscious construction of one’s personality and one’s ‘Weltanschaaung’, but have been buried and forgotten in one of the soul’s hidden spaces as materials that were not used to build or furnish one’s home. (2008a: 343)

The metaphor of the hidden spaces (in the original Italian a metaphorical ‘sottoscala’, ‘space under the staircase’) is then continued on the following page, where it is referred to as a necessary reservoir for the work of great writers.

In several of the Alfabeti essays Magris discusses the city and the metropolis as the indispensable context and framework for much modern and contemporary literature. By far the longest and most detailed essay of the collection, entitled ‘Praga al quadrato’ (2008a: 161–209; ‘Prague squared’, in the mathematical sense), is dedicated to Prague, one of the two cultural capitals of Magris’s investigation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is an essay on the literary and cultural myth of Prague, the capital of a certain kind of Bohemia, very much unlike many of the Parisian associations with its derived adjective. It is in concentrated form also an essay about the history of Magris’s Mitteleuropa. As Magris himself states, Prague’s German-language literature represents in microcosm the issues of all contemporary literature:

The literature of German-language Prague has been an in vitro model for contemporary literature: the voice of a threatened minority (or, in the case of Jewish writers, of a group within a minority) and therefore filled with the anxiety of being submerged, it was confronted with violent immediacy by the problematic awareness of language and its artificial nature, which lies at the foundation of modern poetry, of its truth and its drama. (2008a: 188)

In several parts of the essay Magris examines the many ways in which Prague’s literature is and continues to be a ‘frontier literature’, not only between the languages and literatures that composed the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but also as the frontier of Jewish diasporic assimilation, the frontier between a literature of those who stayed behind and a literature in exile, and – last but not least – a literature on the frontier between a sense of identity and its loss.

Identity, in that relational interplay with community and society that is part of the ‘other within’, is fundamentally related to values (social, political, ethical), to areas of the process of abstraction that are not purely or merely economic. Of the many paradigmatic shifts that literary theory and criticism have undergone since World War II – to some extent driven by scientific and disciplinary needs, but often greatly influenced by intellectual fashions and fads – one of the most recent is the renewed interest in ‘ethical criticism’ (or at least a nominal invocation of the adjective).

In the essay ‘La borsa dei valori’ (Magris, 1999b: 257–64; ‘The values-exchange’, an analogy based on the phrase for the ‘stock-exchange’) Magris examines some of the interconnections between Ego, a sense of identity and self, values, and the surrounding social and political context. It is in this context that I want to compare Magris’s discussion of literature and its many interconnections with identity, society, politics and ethics to that of one of the other Germanists mentioned previously, Franco Fortini (though he would probably not have liked such disciplinary designation). One reason for this comparison is that both authors associate space, form and the border (‘frontiera’) with crucial ethical and aesthetic values. In Questioni di frontiera Fortini writes: ‘Literature is always a locus of displacement (a source of estrangement) and at the same time a dwelling place’ (Fortini, 1977: 12). This is an important statement (although the idioms ‘spaesante’ and ‘appaesante’ in the original Italian are not easily translatable) because of Fortini’s perspective on the relation of literature to life and therefore also to values.

I have always been struck by the ethical tension one finds in almost all of Fortini’s essays, across the spectrum from the more literary to the more social and political. The very high goals set both for himself and for others lead to a uniquely taught prose. Hence the impression one often receives is that of an extremely rigorous, almost pitiless sense of honesty (often devoid of many of the polite rituals of social intercourse). Certainly, in his attention to the political and social arena, he was an extraordinary figure in the Italian culture of his time, ¹⁰ but one rarely finds discussions or reminiscences of the joys, enthusiasms and moments he shared with other writers, critics or fellow activists. Fortini’s rigour (which is undoubtedly part of the admirable and uncompromising political militancy he engaged in for his entire life) sometimes seems to slide into competitiveness (as he confesses in a very honest and self-critical moment in his dialogue with Franco Loi in Franchi dialoghi (Fortini and Loi, 1998: 49–50)), then into a lack of generosity and empathy, and ultimately into full-blown misunderstanding. This is certainly what I believe increasingly happens in the essays he devotes to Pasolini (which end up obscuring most of the deeper reasons for Pasolini’s later film, literary and critical production).

In Magris’s essays one instead finds that this interest in values and ethics is very strongly connected to a sense of shared life, of empathy, of participation in the creations of others, and of a celebration of such a communal existence. It is indeed the indefatigable, relentless and constantly renewed exploration of the relation between ‘self’ and ‘other’, their dialectical (a term now less pervasive, but unfortunately still too seldom accurately used) and relational intertwining, that seems to be always at the core of Magris’s writing: in his literary criticism, his editorials and his narrative works alike.

This differing experience in Fortini and Magris of the relationship between values and life also extends to their connection to literature, criticism and sense of identity. In this regard the different interest in and evaluation of the culture of the Jewish diaspora is particularly interesting. Fortini comes from a Jewish family, but entered the Valdensian (Protestant) church as an adolescent, only to become later on, by his own account, particularly attracted to the personality, values and idiosyncratic Catholicism of Giacomo Noventa, in particular his almost aristocratic sense of the values of ‘nobility’ and ‘heroism’. And Fortini explicitly credits Noventa with opening his eyes to Europe and European culture, beyond the frontiers of Italian culture. Noventa therefore became a fundamental presence in Fortini’s paradoxical and idiosyncratic sense of European identity. This biographical background definitely helps one to understand Fortini’s sense of ‘outsiderness’ and ‘critical distance’, aptly expressed at a symbolic level by the title of one of his collections of writings: L’ospite ingrato (1966; The Ungrateful Guest). ¹¹

Instead, for Magris, the cosmopolitan culture of the Jewish diaspora becomes emblematic of the post-Romantic, modern and postmodern condition of humanity; it conveys the sense of being caught between the ‘prose of life’ and the ‘poetry of the heart’, in a culture where a Renaissance humanist or even the Goethean ideal of the all-rounded development of the individual has become not only patently impossible, but even its mention as a possible goal is usually met with the supercilious scorn of people confronting the absurd. This central role of the ‘other’ (within) is one of the keys to understanding his essay ‘Praga al quadrato’, but more generally his appreciation of the Jewish literature and culture of the diaspora in its interrelationship with Central European culture. ‘Lei è ebreo? È solo una domanda’ (Magris, 1998: 23–31; ‘Are you Jewish? It’s only a question’), Magris’s introductory speech at a conference devoted to Jewish identity, is quite exemplary in this regard, representing the possibilities of positive identity detached from a/the ‘national question’.

For Magris it is precisely this transition from the classic to the romantic, the degradation of form, the limit, the ‘frontier’ understood in another rational and aesthetic sense, that has become increasingly emblematic of contemporary life, and therefore of the difficulty – if not impossibility – of a coherent self, of a sense of measure and proportion, and ultimately therefore also of a cogently, socially constructed or developed identity.

Magris is a specialist in the culture of what one could call – given the sense of melancholia, loss and memory the term evokes – the ‘Biedermeier Empire’. The gradual overshadowing of the ‘Biedermeier Empire’ by the British Empire marked the fall from global pre-eminence or dominance of the European continental powers (I do not count Russia or the Soviet Union as exclusively European), and the emergence of Great Britain (and its colonial/imperial progeny, the United States) as an ominously dystopian island (the dystopian genre being symptomatically well represented in its literature and cinema, V for Vendetta being one of the latest significant examples). To some extent understanding the culture of this Austro-Hungarian Empire helps one to understand the evolution of continental Europe’s cultural and political attitudes and its position on the world stage.

The humanity and also the humanism that Magris derives from the examination and dissection of the ‘Biedermeier Empire’ are directly related to the value of self-examination and self-knowledge, but also in many respects to the role of memory, the past, the Benjaminian ‘Grübler’ and ‘Trauerspiel’ ¹² – a certain kind of intimate nostalgia.

The construction of European identities, however, also requires real engagement in planning the future, and an intellectual stance on all the issues associated with globalization and privatization, or relations to the emerging BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), which cannot simply be ignored and left by default to be decided in uncontested fashion by the (non-continental European) established powers of Empire.

In a world dominated by globalization and privatization, a postmodern obsession with prefabricated notions of identity that are reminiscent of the ‘gated communities’ of the elite seems fully complicit with the obscenities of late imperialism and neo-colonial aggression we have been witnessing almost uninterruptedly since the so-called end of the Cold War. Western European societies have been unable to deal with the disintegration of democratic forms of institutional aggregation and representation since the late 1960s. The constructive and self-organizational side of institution-building and the slow, painful and often obscure work that is involved in the securing of truly democratic forms of coexistence is a whole area of social life that has been ignored and/or wilfully removed from public discussion.

In ‘Vor dem Gesetz: Literatur und Recht’ (Magris, 2010a: ‘Before the law: literature and right(s)’), a talk that was part of a conference also devoted to Europe as a cultural idea (see note 3) and which – ironically – was erroneously listed in the index of the conference proceedings as ‘Von der Donau zum Meer’, ¹³ Magris gives voice to the troubling absence of discussion about values, not only in the realms of individual consciousness, awareness and spirituality as they can be (and hopefully are) affected by literature, but also as part of the mutually defended norms of cohabitation and the justice of the institutions we build to protect and nurture them. Here Magris establishes a transition from sensitivity, awareness and concern to rights, justice and communally sanctioned and enforced law: from Europe as a cultural idea to European identity as an (inter)active element in constructive institutional change.

Identity is therefore shaped inwardly by the assumption of values, and by the interactive work of cultural construction of one’s self. But it is also shaped by specific historical and material circumstances, forces, institutions and laws – elements over which the individual has little or no control.

One of Magris’s latest works of fiction, Blindly, indirectly gives us a perspective on both the inward and the outward institutional forces at work in the process of identity formation. Blindly is a work of dystopian spaces, penal and forced labour colonies, or, at the end of the spatial spectrum, smaller architectural spaces, the insane asylum. Institutions are therefore overwhelmingly represented in their oppressive, confining and distorting aspect. The circumstances of the plot, the musings and reflections of the characters, and perhaps above all the title of the work itself, emphasize how the inward process of the construction of identity has also been increasingly internalized as the work of chance, and how deception, manipulation and instrumental dehumanization have deformed, curtailed or shattered this process.

Blindly purveys the stories of two protagonists: Cippico, who in a sense represents the continuity with Magris’s Mitteleuropa (or least the periphery of the Hapsburg domains, the former Yugoslavia), ¹⁴ and Jorgen Jorgensen, who represents the more ‘peripheral’, northern and Protestant Europe that has also been part of Magris’s research. It is symptomatic that peripheral and Protestant Europe is represented by Scandinavian culture, and that Jorgensen’s voyages and adventures are situated in a past dimension of capitalism still seen as somewhat of an escapade, a ‘Robinsonade’, ¹⁵ rather than the present global system of subjugation and devastation of the world, its history and its cultures. Capitalism is enforced today more by means of imperial institutions (the outward forces) than as a result of the ‘drift’ of ‘market forces’ (to the extent that they are still powerful, inward forces driven by the appetites of consumption). These changes have significantly impacted both the nature of capitalism, and the consequences for our social and historical heritage(s). In Blindly, instead, the epic saga associated with Jorgensen still point to and preserve a certain ‘aura’ of primitive accumulation, individual enterprise and the ‘adventures’ associated with it. Similarly, in Magris’s essays the literature and culture of the UK and the US is only occasionally examined, and mostly in the form of classics from the nineteenth century, or in its adventurous, juvenile and somewhat escapist dimensions. Magris does not openly engage in a criticism that is somehow revealing of these countries’ role at the centre of this dehumanizing, all-consuming, juggernaut. ¹⁶

Blindly is a work that in the expanded geographical scope of its protagonists’ voyages in some ways acknowledges ‘globalization’, while in the compressed spaces of its institutions and their effects on the psychology and credibility of these same protagonists and their accounts seems to recognize very indirectly the forces of disinformation, distortion and propaganda at work in much of the current mass media, together with the questionable reliability that ‘documentation’ and ‘authority’ may still possess for the careful reader.

The inward paths towards identity formation in the novel are still associated with Central Europe (‘macht-geschützte Innerlichkeit’, ‘power-protected inwardness’, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Mann), with the Biedermeier Empire and its more measurable, ‘human’, central spaces, and with a somewhat retrospective ‘melancholic’ gaze that knows this reality and institutions are irredeemably passed. This Empire can be named, and its borders are somehow scrutable, at the centre of an existential universe. Yet the contemporary actual omnipresent empire, an ‘Atlanticist periphery’ that is ‘nowhere’ and yet ‘everywhere’, while again to some extent foreshadowed in the epic nature of Jorgensen’s travels, remains both temporally (‘behind’ the ‘melancholic’ gaze so to speak), and geographically (diffuse, invisible, omnipresent, but never named) invisible. The ‘New World Order’ and the ideals of world domination (see Brzezinski, 1997), which do indeed relate to past European totalitarian ideals, seem almost akin to the ‘uncharted’ territories of medieval and Renaissance maps, symbolized by monsters, but cognitively ‘off the charts’.

In a sense, it is as if Blindly exhibited its own forms of blindness. The ‘cultural idea’ of Europe can somehow be contained and its ‘humanistic’ essence distilled along the path of Mitteleuropean memories and interactions, appropriated through the ‘melancholy’ gaze, in the core central dimensions of a past now vanished, but in whose soil ‘our’ roots lie. Inward and central become almost synonymous. But those institutional, social, political, military, economic and legal components that shape our present through outward pressure, are invisible in almost all of Magris’s latest fiction and essayistic production, in a blind spot, illuminated by rare exceptions (see Magris, 2010a). ¹⁷

Of course informed consent and truly interactive identity formation are key aspects not only of political democracy even in its most accepted liberal definition(s), but are also essential elements in being able to construct a truly participatory and autonomous, open ‘European identity’: they are bridges between the inward and outward forces that shape such an endeavour. ¹⁸

‘European identity’ is a concept situated at a fairly high level of abstraction – as an isolated phrase socially, culturally and historically indeterminate. Magris’s work has provided us with one path to help us give this concept some content: his many detailed historical examinations of social and cultural relations in Central Europe that defied stereotype and abstraction, and occasionally breached mutually defeating ‘identities’ seen as ‘gated communities’, are all essential first steps along this path. It is now also up to us to discuss and engage in the complex, but enriching, work that would allow for its continued interactive construction in the present, its unfolding openness towards both ‘the other’ and the future, in full awareness of and readiness for those forces trying to establish much more virulent, controlled, limited and irreversible forms of ‘gated community’.

Yet a discussion and construction of democratic forms of European identity/identities will not be possible at a purely abstract, theoretical, philosophical, ideological and/or political level. It will have to deal with fundamental historical, economic, social and above all institutional issues.

Without the inclusion of such issues in discussions about cultural aspects of identity, no concrete and realistic debate will be possible. Identity never was, is or can be an island. It is a work in progress, and the result of interaction. But to be integral, based on realistic levels of self-knowledge, and founded on truly ethical and participatory foundations, the interactions that help construct it have to be transparent and avoid coercion and manipulation: something that is ever less the case in the desert of evacuated postmodern imperial culture(s). And more human, socially just, infinitely less wasteful forms of identity and association that take the autonomy and intrinsic value of non-human forms of life as essential to cohabitation on Planet Earth will be even less likely to be implemented unless the incredible urgency of such changes is faced head on.

Magris’s lesson, with the demythologization of both myth and history, history as myth, and myth as ‘blocked/encapsulated’ history, as well as occasional blindness, is relevant to an always more inclusive and relational active life (also and especially beyond the borders of professional and academic activity); it is a lesson that very urgently needs to become part of Europe’s identity and its practices.