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2012 42: 375Journal of European StudiesElena Coda

Alla ciecaUtopia and disenchantment in Claudio Magris's   

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Utopia and disenchantment in Claudio Magris’s Alla cieca

Elena CodaPurdue University

AbstractThis essay analyses Claudio Magris’s novel Alla cieca (2005; Blindly, 2010) vis-à-vis the crisis of the postmodern novel in the new millennium. It begins by emphasizing the sense of discontent with postmodern narrative practices as articulated by Franco Rella, Claudio Magris and Romano Luperini in various texts. The rest of the essay is a discussion of Magris’s complex novel in which, through the shattered voice of the protagonist, the author unveils the ideals, the compromises and the tragedies that have informed the last two hundred years of European history. Although the novel depicts the crisis and collapse of political ideals and strong ideologies, it does not yield to a weak nihilism, nor does it argue in favour of a levelling of every belief.

KeywordsAlla cieca, ethics and narrative, Romano Luperini, Claudio Magris, postmodernism, Franco Rella, treatment of history

The point of departure for these reflections on Claudio Magris’s novel Alla cieca, pub-lished in Italy in 2005 and recently translated into English, are the important contribu-tions by Claudio Magris, Franco Rella and Romano Luperini to the role of contemporary narrative, which unveil a profound sense of dissatisfaction with postmodern narrative practices. In an article entitled ‘Romanzo e conoscenza, appunti per un’introduzione’ (Magris, 1999a; ‘The novel and knowledge: notes for an introduction’) Magris brings to the fore the issues that he believes to be pivotal in understanding the purpose of the novel at the turn of the millennium. Here the author emphasizes the fundamental cognitive function of the novel: the role of the novel ‘is to narrate, to convey experiences and to teach … how to put oneself in someone else’s place in order to understand concretely the world and its history’ (1999a: 46)1 with all its injustices, contradictions and conflicts.

Corresponding author:Elena Coda, School of Languages and Cultures, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA Email: ecoda@purdue.edu

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However, the trend in contemporary narrative, Magris continues, is to reduce the novel into a consolatory placebo, which evades, negates or smoothes over the tensions present in our world even when superficially it depicts the darkest and the most dramatic plots. Instead, the novel must be able to stare true evil in the face: ‘Every true book meas-ures itself with the demonical nature of existence’ (1999a: 51).

Thus, Magris’s narrative approach might be understood as an overturning of Italo Calvino’s well-known theory of lightness. Whereas Calvino affirms that, in order not to be petrified by the weight and opacity of the world and be reduced to silence, as a writer he must be like Perseus, who never stares at Medusa directly, but looks at her only in the reflection of his shield (Calvino, 1995 [1991]: 631−5), Magris underscores the necessity of a direct approach, which requires the will to unveil ‘the Gorgon behind the pink rouge of reassuring falsifications’ (Magris, 1999a: 48). There is much more goodness in the ability and courage to probe unbearable truths and to descend into the most intolerable darkness than in any ‘conciliatory bonhomie’ (1999a: 51): only in so doing it might be possible to fight the evil that plagues our social, historical or individual fabric. As he had already noted in his collection of essays entitled Utopia e disincanto (1999b; ‘Utopia and Disenchantment’), this literary tactic is particularly important in our time, when all the overreaching philosophies of the past, with all their illusions of grand totalities and coherence, have crumbled and unveiled the fact that ‘now the future of the world seems instead at the mercy of a chaotic and unpredictable upheaval, indifferent to ambitious designs and perspectives’ (Magris, 1999b: 41).

However, for Magris the crisis of comprehensive philosophical systems does not lead to an indifferent levelling of all positions or to the facile optimism that informed Fukuyama’s assertion that history had reached its end, a statement that – Magris reminds us with his subtle irony – should have been placed right from its inception into Flaubert’s Sottisier, his encyclopaedic collection of stupid quotations (1999b: 9).2

On the contrary, the collapse of totalizing hegemonic orders requires an ethical com-mitment that brings together a strong utopic drive with an appropriate dose of disen-chantment. If utopia ‘signifies not surrendering to things as they are’, but ‘fighting for how things should be’ (1999b: 11), thus appropriating Brecht’s line that the world does indeed need to be changed, disenchantment is the awareness that the redemption prom-ised by utopia will never come: ‘the destiny of every human being, and of History itself, resembles the destiny of Moses who never reached the promised land, but never stopped walking towards it’ (1999b: 11). Thus Magris, in an essay included in the volume Quale totalità (Magris et al., 1985; Which Totality), questions the theorization brought forth by Gianni Vattimo and other postmodern thinkers of the absolute dissolution of any norma-tive foundation.3 Although it would be naive not to recognize the weakening of authori-tarian foundations in our time, this does not mean that we should ‘come to the conclusion that our thought can renounce the need for foundation, the need, that is, for constantly establishing and founding a totality, a totality in flux’ (Magris et al., 1985: 69). Human beings cannot renounce ‘the necessity of establishing, in the chaos of multiplicity, mean-ingful connections that from multiplicity create unity, not chaos’ (1985: 69−70). This unity is always provisional, always in the making, never fulfilled. Yet, this lack of fulfil-ment should never be transformed into a complacent or triumphal nihilism, in which − as Magris reminds us in the opening essay of his book tellingly entitled La storia non è

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finita (2006; History Has Not Ended) − every idea and position is levelled ‘into an undif-ferentiated equivalence of everything with everything else, in a sort of bazaar in which a universal principle of exchange puts everything on the same level’ (Magris, 2006: 16).

In order to keep alive this idealistic utopic charge towards a meaning, towards an ethi-cal universalism in which we can all recognize ourselves, in spite of our many differ-ences (2006: 16), human beings must be willing to acknowledge the weight of history with all its unspeakable horrors and anonymous victims. As he had already noted in Utopia e disincanto, the kind of history that interests Magris is not the monumental monolithic history informed by the Hegelian Welt Geist, which he perceives as a river that sweeps away and drowns little individual histories, erasing them from the memory of the world. The role of the writer is to ‘recover [these] shipwrecked existences’ (Magris, 1999b: 11) submerged by the current of History and to take them on board a precarious Noah’s Ark made of paper. This salvific attempt is definitely utopic, for the ark might very well sink, but it is this utopia that gives sense to our existence, ‘because it demands … that life have a meaning’ (1999b: 11).

For Magris the literary point of reference to express the unresolved historical tensions of the world we inhabit are still the great novels of the twentieth century which, with their fragmented style and often ‘failed’ endings, give voice to ‘the truth of a broken, shattered time’ (Magris, 2010a: 47). Thus he questions whether the

terrible grandeur of the twentieth century has really been shelved by the dim light of postmodernity and its literature, a literature that no longer strikes like a blow, as Kafka wanted, even if many horrible things continue to happen in the world. (2010a: 46)

In this sense, postmodern narrative and philosophical practices do not seem to offer a viable overcoming of the predicament of our century, but are perceived as a mere recy-cling of modernist themes (2010a: 46).

The relationship between evil and narrative, and the ethical responsibility of the novel, is also tackled by Franco Rella in his important book Figure del male (2002). Here Rella notes that although the reflection and representation of evil have been one of the most important subjects addressed and examined in modernist literature since Baudelaire, Melville and Dostoevsky, and that they had become the central theme in art during the first part of the twentieth century, today it seems that we are moving towards a ‘futiliza-tion of art’ (Rella, 2002: 81) where artistic production is sinking into a purely aesthetic dimension or into some sort of merry meaninglessness. And yet, Rella argues, it is right at the time (between the nineteenth and the twentieth century) when the mimetic pact between linguistic representation and reality has been forever disrupted that the artist is charged with a new and ‘terrible’ responsibility − the responsibility to interrogate and penetrate the mystery of a world that seems to have lost any coherent meaning. This is the ethical obligation not only of literature and the arts, but also of criticism: thus the sort of postmodern literature and theory that celebrates pure nihilistic games void of meaning is for Rella ‘above all an immoral act’ (2002: 81).

The sense of dissatisfaction expressed by Rella and Magris vis-à-vis a literature preoccupied only with its aesthetic dimension, is also echoed by the literary critic Romano Luperini who, in his recent book La fine del postmoderno, published in 2005

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(interestingly enough, the same year of publication as Alla cieca) gives a program-matic analysis of the crisis of postmodern literature and theory.4 Here Luperini notes that ‘a morbid and satisfied nihilism, insensible to the cares of the world has spread’ in the last decades in cultural and literary circles (Luperini, 2005: 11). Like Rella, Luperini notes how at the end of the twentieth century we have witnessed the diffusion in literature and in the theory of abstract intertextual games – Franco Rella calls this practice ‘a soft embroidering of emptiness’ (2002: 74) – void of any referential histori-cal or social meaning, which led – as Magris has also pointed out – to Fukuyama’s flawed and falsely reassuring theorization of the end of history and of the end of every ideological conflict after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

However, the events of 9/11 have revealed that in fact history did not end with the fall of communism but that we live in a world characterized by irresolvable clashes, different terrorisms, and a new condition of insecurity and precariousness which requires a litera-ture that is ethically and politically more responsible (Luperini, 2005: 26): a literature that, having abandoned the empty nihilism of facile postmodern exercises, returns to the great questions of modernity by re-establishing a political and utopic tension which unveils and addresses the conflicts that characterize our civilization, in an attempt to transform them ‘into a critical awareness of differences and into a dialogue’ (2005: 61). Luperini calls this new narrative trend ‘neo-modern’ or ‘late-modern’ (2005: 13), a trend that should not be viewed as a nostalgic regression towards the past nor as a last attempt to reshuffle postmodern formulas, but as a new narrative possibility willing to face the complex political and social reality in which we live (2005: 13).

There is nothing edifying or perverse in great literature; but, as Magris observes, by plung-ing into the inferno of our modern history and not shying away from its horrors, literature can give meaning and illuminate the ‘chaotic caducity’ of our ephemeral existence (Magris, 1999b: 24). Furthermore, in it one can find, as Rella reminds us, ‘a question shouted at God and the world, as had already been done by Dostoevsky, or Kafka in the Penal Colony, or Francis Bacon in the demonic grimace of his popes’ (Rella, 2002: 75).

It is not by chance, then, that the novel Alla cieca is framed by a question mark, intro-duced at the beginning of the novel when the narrator, at the direction of his psychiatrist, starts to write down his complex history: ‘if I remember correctly … that question mark, hauling all the rest along with it, was the very first thing I actually wrote down’ (Magris, 2010b: 1). That question mark posited at the beginning of the novel does not only ques-tion the fragile identity or the reliability of the double narrator Cippico/Jorgensen, but it also underscores the necessity to question constantly and relentlessly the events of his-tory – no matter how big or small – in which one lives and the ideology that, even if in good faith, informs one’s actions and beliefs. Only in so doing is it possible to search for some sense of truth that, even if provisional and incomplete, can help us orient ourselves in the chaos and meaninglessness of the world we inhabit. By refusing the literary praxis of playfulness and lightness typical of certain postmodern narratives, Alla cieca gives voice to the tragic political and utopic tensions and contradictions that characterize roughly the last 200 years of European history, unveiling the false totality of the world and forcing the reader to stare at the horrors and suffering of History’s rejected and for-gotten victims, thus rescuing them from their marginal position and giving them voice and memory.

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The novel which, as Sandra Parmegiani has noted, ‘blends myth, history, individual and collective memories, in a whirlwind narrative of epic proportions’ (Parmegiani, 2011: 114−15) comprises the complex, fragmented and circular narrations of the double persona Salvatore Cippico/Jorgen Jorgensen who lived more than 100 years apart. The octogenarian Salvatore Cippico, a survivor of both Nazi and communist concentration camps, confined in a mental institution in Trieste (but maybe not − maybe we are in Australia) urged by his psychiatrist, writes down his double story. As Salvatore Cippico, he took part in all the tragic events that shaped European history in the twentieth century. A fervent believer in commu-nism, he sacrificed everything for his ideals. As a young man, he perceived himself as a modern Jason, an epic hero who participates in the totality of the world − a world in which everything makes sense and where, to borrow Lukács’ famous phrase, ‘the starry sky is the map of all possible paths’ (Lukács, 1971 [1916]: 29). Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece is compared to Cippico’s desire to spread communism’s principles and to maintain its red flag high and pure.5 Cippico’s tragedy and ultimate undoing is that he will have to recognize the caducity of his ideals and the disintegration of his world, where not even the stars maintain their reassuring stability: ‘the land is spinning the sea pitching even the sun and the stars and history are spinning and men are vomiting’ (Magris, 2010b: 128).

However, if the revelation of the precariousness of his beliefs and the fragility of his existence (constantly split by his frail mind into two personae) do not allow him to see himself any longer as the upright hero of an epic time, they do not dissolve him into a meaningless void, an empty simulacrum without an essence.6 The relentless voice of Cippico, which narrates and questions his fragmented and nightmarish story, maintains, even in the confinement of the mental asylum, an irreducible longing for a sense of meaning and authenticity for human beings’ precarious and contradictory existence. As he points out early in the novel, our worst defeat is ‘having lost the battle of Gog and Magog, for not being able to give more meaning to man’s history’ (2010b: 66). By recounting his double story to anyone willing to listen, he can rescue it from oblivion, unveil the ethical principles that informed his actions, and convey the spirit of sacrifice and the dignity with which he endured his tragic fate. Thus he cannot give up his faith in words; he must maintain the illusion that:

words are of another world, free messengers … capable of passing through the prison walls like angels, off to tell the truth of what has been and proclaim good tidings of what is to come … Talking even just between us is perhaps the only way left for me to be faithful to the revolution. (2010b: 25−6)

After having spent his childhood and early adulthood in Tasmania and Australia with his family, in 1932 Cippico is deported to Italy for communist activities (the land of his ancestors, where he had lived with his father as a boy for a few years). His desire to fight fascism with all its injustices leads him to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, where he is an astounded witness of the Barcelona uprising, where anarchists and Trotskyists were attacked and decimated by Stalinist brigades: ‘we mowed down our ranks, Communists against anarchists, socialists against Communists, and made an opening for death’ (2010b: 142), recalls Cippico bitterly. Right then, he comments with dismay, he should have realized that they would return home without the Golden Fleece but only with rags covered with the blood of their slaughtered brothers, useless and quickly forgotten

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victims, dismissed or manipulated by the official narrative of the events.7 But then, firmly convinced that he was fighting for the right cause, in order not to weaken the Party’s ideology he continued to accept its vision, even when he knew that its actions were wrong:

Did I feel humiliated because of this? It just goes to show that all of you here have no idea what slavery is, freedom, the struggle, what it means to fight for the dignity of everyone, even those you don’t know, even that of your enemies who will one day be your brothers … it does not matter much if you live to see that day. (2010b: 126)

History, the voice of the narrator repeats throughout the novel, is a telescope held up to a blinded eye, referring to the story – witnessed by Cippico’s other persona, the Danish adventurer Jorgen Jorgensen (who lived a century earlier) – of how Nelson, having put a telescope in front of his bandaged eye, did not see that Copenhagen was surrendering and thus kept on bombarding it until it was completely destroyed. The events of Barcelona, comments Cippico now, also happened in the dark, ‘a platoon of one-eyed men with the good eye blindfold’ (2010b: 141) killing their own brothers. How is it possible, asks Cippico throughout the novel, to see in the darkness? To distinguish right from wrong? Or, to use one of Magris’s poignant images, how is it possible to know if what you are following are indeed Antigone’s ‘unwritten laws of the Gods’ (Magris, 2006: 13), the moral absolutes that cannot be violated no matter what, and not instead disposable cul-tural, or historical constructions, whose values only appear to be absolute?

Back from Spain he fights fascism in both Italy and Yugoslavia until he is arrested and sent to Dachau. Here ‘in that arctic night of the world’ (Magris, 2010b: 149), in spite of the unspeakable suffering, he is able to maintain his dignity as a human being because he can still hold on to his beliefs:

I knew that, for life to be worth living, we had to scrape that blackness off the face of the earth … I knew what I wanted to fight for and what I would have wanted to fight against, had I been able to. (2010b: 171−3)

Still strong in his idealistic faith in communism, he accepts, with many others (the famous 2000 workers from Monfalcone) to go to Yugoslavia in order to help Tito’s socialist programme.8 The Party’s secretary tells him that his role will be to keep an eye on his comrades and to report back if they are acting in any way against the norms of the Party. After Tito’s split with Stalinist Russia, the Italian volunteers are seen as potential spies for Stalin and considered enemies of the state: as a result they are imprisoned in the ‘naked’ island of Goli Otok and condemned to forced labour. In the time spent in this gulag, similar to the Nazis’ concentration camps, Cippico must endure the brutal physi-cal and psychological torture inflicted by the guards and the other inmates turned jailers in the hope of more favourable treatment. Here he must also realize ‘the tragedy and senselessness of the world’ (2010b: 65), acknowledge for the first time how communism has betrayed his ideals of a just world, and recognize his inability to give meaning to human history. As opposed to the epic hero of the Argonauts who, after many trials and adventures, is able to capture the Golden Fleece and successfully fulfil his task, Cippico is a modern Odysseus condemned to the perpetual condition of homelessness: ‘No

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voyage is too long and perilous if it brings you back home. But do houses to return to still exist, did they ever exist?’ (2010b: 65). Cippico’s life journey can only take him to the tormented void of his own madness.

After the horrors of Goli Otok there is no place for him in Trieste or in the Communist Party that he has served faithfully and unconditionally for so many years. His imprison-ment in the Titoist gulags is seen as an embarrassment and he is perceived as a potential disruptor of the Party’s unity: therefore he is ordered to keep quiet and forget what hap-pened.9 Even the archives in Fiume, where the documents of Tito’s atrocities were kept, are quickly destroyed, to ensure that this uncomfortable past will never be remembered:

None of this story, Vidali and Bernetich told me in Trieste when I came back from Goli Otok, was to be spoken of and would never be known. Indeed I kept silent, like everyone else … We never told the story and now we no longer know it; things must be told continuously, otherwise they are forgotten. (2010b: 193)

As Pamela Balinger notes in her well-researched book, History in Exile, the fate of Cominformists (as the Communists faithful to Stalin were called in Yugoslavia) ‘remained a public secret covered in shame on which few dared to remark until Tito’s death’ (Ballinger, 2003 [2002]: 110).10 Deprived of his history and ideals, jobless and pressured by the party to leave Trieste, Cippico returns as a displaced person to Australia, and it is here that the news of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism will reach him. Watching through the windows of a TV store, on multiple screens, the dis-course of Gorbachev who announces the end of the Soviet Union, and seeing the red flag, the symbol of his beliefs, lowered forever, Cippico feels as if the ground is literally col-lapsing under his feet; history for him has ceased to exist. This is the end of everything:

the flags flutter, ripple, flow together; one huge flag, a stage curtain that is lowered, obscuring the world and so much the worse for those who are under it and get it on their heads. The Iron Curtain falls like a guillotine and cuts the heart in two, my heart. (Magris, 2010b: 347)

The end of the Soviet Union is the last stroke for the exhausted and tried Cippico who loses his mind, and is sent back to Trieste, where he is committed to the mental institution from which he narrates his story.

Interspersed with Cippico’s accounts of his tragic history is the story of the Danish adventurer Jorgen Jorgensen, who lived between northern Europe and Australia more than a century earlier, and from whom Cippico claims to have been cloned, just like Dolly, the famous sheep. As a young man Jorgensen’s love for the open sea and adven-tures make him embark on British ships and sail to the southern hemisphere. He travels to Cape Town, and after joining the crew of the Lady Nelson, he is one of the first settlers of the Van Diemen’s Land, the current Tasmania, where he will return to die, years later, as a prisoner in a penal colony that is very similar to the gulags and concentration camps experienced by Cippico in twentieth-century Europe. In his life he also witnesses the senseless bombardment of Copenhagen by Nelson, who knowingly ignored the surren-der of the city. In 1809 he is in Iceland where, after having deposed the governor, he declares the independence of the island from Denmark and proclaims himself ruler. His control over the island, Jorgensen tells us, would have lasted only until the people could

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organize themselves and take over the government. For Jorgensen/Cippico this is the error of every revolution: the unwillingness to give the power back to the people, and thus the transformation of any revolution into a bloodthirsty tyranny, interested more in vengeance and retaliation than in providing freedom and stability to the people: ‘Revolution must be magnanimous; otherwise it’s no longer a revolution. If it begins punishing its vanquished enemies, even the scoundrels, it starts to enjoy it and never stops punishing, killing, it can’t stop’ (Magris, 2010b: 155).

Jorgensen, however, will not have time to see his plan for justice and clemency imple-mented. Just as Cippico’s dream of creating a more just society in Yugoslavia is shattered by historical alliances and events, so is Jorgensen’s. A few weeks later he will be deposed, arrested and imprisoned, and after further adventures he will end up a broken man, pen-niless and an alcoholic in Hobart, the city that he helped found many years earlier, con-demned to forced labour for life for his many gambling debts.

From the tragic, broken and overlapping voices of Cippico and Jorgensen, which nar-rate their lives in a circular, incoherent and convulsive manner, we learn more than just the tragic betrayal of their ideals and their incredible suffering. If it is true, as Ernestina Pellegrini has noted, that the two protagonists are men who are moving blindly, ‘pro-pelled by the engine of their own ideals and faiths, or swept away by the impersonal machinery of power [and] ideologies’ (Pellegrini, 2006: 36), it is also true that a careful reading of the novel brings to the fore the tragic responsibilities, both individual and col-lective, hidden in their choices and actions. Like Cippico, who observes and recognizes the incongruities and the ethical faults inherent in some of his Party’s positions, person-ally condemns them, but continues to follow the Party line because he truly believes in its cause, so Jorgen Jorgensen accepts as a fait accompli the fact that the discovery of the New World will bring forth the colonization of the land and subjugation of the natives by the occupying powers. One can apply to Jorgensen what Magris elsewhere has pointed out about the Argonauts: to them ‘the whole world, even the unknown and threatening parts of it, seems to offer itself up to be seized and plundered’ (Magris, 1999c: 69−70). Right from its inception the discovery of the terra australis is marked with bloodshed. Black swans, whales, kangaroos and seals are all killed gratuitously, to satisfy the glut-tony or fulfil the libidinal fantasies of the crew. Reverend Knopwood shoots at the black swans ‘because he is avid for their meat and gorges himself on it as much as he can’ (Magris, 2010b: 96), while the men kill the seals for sheer carnal pleasure: ‘the truth is that men indulge in bestial acts, with seals, and then rage against pups using the fur as a pretext, but the real reason is lust, flesh and blood often go together’ (2010b: 87). To the destruction of nature corresponds the rape of the native women, bartered by their men for a couple of shirts. When all is done and the sailors retreat to their ship, only ‘a bloodied white shirt remained on the shore, evidence of our passage and of our exploratory voy-age’ (2010b: 87). Carnage notwithstanding, it is a voyage that – Jorgensen tells us, fol-lowing the imperialistic logic of the time – fulfilled its mission because it ‘confirmed Dr Bass’s discovery and provided much data for identifying and mapping the straits that bears his name’ (2010b: 87).

Towards the end of his life, as an ex-detainee in Tasmania, Jorgensen will participate in the capture and forced relocation of the Aborigines, guiding groups of convicts against the natives: ‘the damned against the damned’ (2010b: 312), he observes, echoing his alter

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ego’s remarks on how his comrades became torturers while in the Goli Otok concentra-tion camp. Following the traditional beliefs of Western colonialism, Jorgensen is also able to rationalize the violence inflicted upon the original inhabitants:

We are bringing them civilization and we have to make them understand. Revolution and progress can’t always be gentle. It is for their own good that we must force them; anyone who is a do-gooder can’t help but want to civilize the savages and inflict it on them. Moreover they would end up becoming extinct, left to themselves in those inhospitable forests. (2010b: 310)

‘History is a spyglass held up to a blindfold eye’ (2010b: 88), declares the double narra-tor many times as a tragic but inevitable fact. However, in spite of this recurrent leitmotif, the protagonist is aware that things could also have turned out differently − that once in a while one should have the courage to put the telescope in front of the good eye. In so doing it would be possible to question both the historical events in which Cippico/Jorgensen participated and their own personal responsibilities. Thus, the roving parties against the aborigines, the deforestation of the jungle and the creation of the new city of Hobart Town might not be the manifestation of the Hegelian Weltgeist, as Reverend Knopwood believes: ‘The City is order, stronger than nature’s order. Man, it is written, will dominate the earth’ (2010b: 94). Instead, the killing of the natives and the destruc-tion of nature might be understood for what they are − the exemplification of what Hannah Arendt calls ‘total terror’, whose logic goes beyond the strategic means to solid-ify and retain power, but marks instead the entry into a new realm ruled by a ‘superhu-man force’ of Nature or History that always moves forward, blind to the human wreckage that it causes:

Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action … It is this movement that singles out the foes of mankind against which the terror is let loose, and no free action … can be permitted to interfere with the elimination of the ‘objective enemy’ of History or Nature, of the class or the race. Guilt and innocence become senseless notions; ‘guilty’ is he who stands in the way of the natural or historical process which has passed judgment over ‘inferior races’, over individuals ‘unfit to live’, over ‘dying classes and decadent peoples’. (Arendt, 1973 [1951]: 465)

This is the realm where ‘everything is possible’ (1973 [1951]: 440). It allows us to under-stand ‘the extermination of native peoples [during] … the colonization of the Americas, Australia and Africa’ (1973 [1951]: 440) as well as the genocides perpetrated during the twentieth century.

From this perspective it becomes possible for Jorgensen to see in the construction of the new city the foreshadowing of the concentration camps of the twentieth century:

Where does order lie, I wondered as I commanded the logging operations necessary for the huts, where does disorder lie? Do those rows of huts, those muddy lanes, drained and widened, which gradually become streets, lead to order or chaos? Even the barracks in Dachau were nicely aligned, each with its own number. Even the death registry is always in order. (Magris, 2010b: 95)

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Moreover, by removing the blindfold, it might be possible to see that hidden behind the myth of Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece there is a used, betrayed, abandoned and forgotten Medea, who in the novel takes the form of the many women (Maria, Marie, Mariza, Márja) who Cippico and Jorgensen use and abandon in order to pursue their adventures and ideals.11 Before the vengeful infanticide that made her famous, Medea is a maiden in love, led into believing that she might live a happy life with Jason if she helps him in his pursuit of the Golden Fleece. For love, she betrays her people and her family; she is responsible for her brother’s death and the defeat of her own people. But Jason, as Magris has noted in pages dedicated to the Greek tragedy, ‘is a liar skilful not only in deceiving others, but also himself, thus stifling his awareness of his own guilt and committing evil while convinced that he has no choice’ (Magris, 1999c: 71). Self-deception and the subsequent conviction of not having an alternative also inform the behaviour of the protagonist of the novel towards the women he (both as Cippico and Jorgensen) loves, and who, with their interchangeable names, come to represent all the innocent victims of history. Thus Jorgensen lies to himself and to us when he recounts how his girlfriend Marie, with the aid of her brother, helped him escape from England on a boat:

Yes, I know I was an idiot to tell Marie that she too would be coming with me, to take advantage of her since she took my every word as gospel truth – it is love, they say, but I don’t know if that’s true … In any case, I had to tell her that, otherwise who knows what a fuss she would have made. (Magris, 2010b: 202)

The plan unfortunately does not work as predicted. Jorgensen is arrested and Marie’s brother is sent to the penal colony of Port Arthur: ‘I never heard anything more about him … I never heard anything about Marie either, for a long time’ (2010b: 202). The fate of the two siblings is quickly dismissed while at the same time the protagonist denies any responsibility for Marie’s possible pregnancy: ‘What’s that? No, I don’t know anything about a baby, leave me alone, what do I have to do with it?’ (2010b: 202). Ironically, Jorgensen’s dismissal of Marie’s fate recalls the indifferent com-ment of Comrade Luttmann, after the events of Barcelona: ‘No, I don’t remember anything important happening in Barcelona’ (2010b: 141), underlining how indi-vidual and collective stories can be quickly erased from one’s bad conscience. Marie’s fate is forgotten, her name is just a variation of so many other names of women whose destinies are engulfed by the sea of history. In the hellish circular structure of the novel, where events inescapably repeat themselves, the same fate also awaits Marica, the sensual and passionate woman that Cippico loves while he is fighting as a partisan in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. She is eventually killed for betraying her brother, one of the Chetnik guerrilla leaders who are engaged in the fight against Tito’s partisans. Trusting Cippico, Mariza reveals where her brother and his unit are hiding, thus signing his death sentence. Here too Cippico tries to deflect his responsibility:

I would never have thought, relaying it shortly afterwards to Comrade Vukmanovich of the VII Corpus, that … that’s how it happened, in the uproar and chaos of those days a man gets confused, they tell him something they ask something he replies. (2010b: 208)

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Women are, the protagonist reflects now, so many years after the events narrated took place:

our great shield and we hold it up between us and life, to take life’s blows. My great shield, Maria, Marie, Marica – as long as I carried the shield I was safe, but I was afraid, I dropped it … Each time death was about to catch up to me, I let love, a piece of my heart, drop. (2010b: 205)

The reader’s glimpse into the destinies of the women who make their brief appearance in the pages of the novel ‘to take life’s blows’ is coupled with the enigmatic image of the figurehead that embellishes the prow of the ships on which Jorgensen sailed in his many journeys. The figurehead might serve as a useful life-raft during a shipwreck, when the sailor grabs on to her to save his life from the fury of the sea; but, just like a woman turned troublesome, it can be easily cut off:

My ship cut straight through the waves when Maria was at the prow. When they told me to throw the figurehead into the sea, I obeyed. I severed it off with the stroke of an axe and let her fall into the water, to lighten the ballast and make the ship sail faster. The waves carried her away. (2010b: 130−1)

The conflation of the female protagonists, in their different reincarnations, with the fig-urehead is emphasized at the end of the novel when Cippico shows the doctor the statues that he has been carving, in an attempt to immortalize all the women of his long and tormented past:

They are all here, never so clear and recognizable as now: this one is Maria, that one is Marie, that other one Marica, then Màrja and Norah and Mangawana … All recaptured, they won’t get away again, all composed and rigid and full of dignity, and I won’t lose them again; I keep watch over them, I take care of them … finally at peace with myself, not guilty. (2010b: 350)

If the images of the figureheads can give Cippico some consolation in his present condi-tion and alleviate his sense of guilt, they are also a reminder of the brutal and violent fate they endured. These women turned into statues represent all the vulnerable and helpless victims of the horrors of history. They are the ones who, having stared into the eyes of Medusa have been turned into stone, have lost their voice and individuality and have been rendered impassive, indifferent to the ‘imminent, unavoidable catastrophes’ (2010b: 181) of history, their stare empty, because only ‘emptiness can sustain the sight of empti-ness’ (2010b: 181). In the circular movement that is typical of this novel, which proceeds like a whirlpool in which all debris from history are muddled together, it is only now, as statues whose eyes have been carved out, that these women can ‘sustain the sight of the Gorgon, bear like a caryatid the intolerable weight of reality’ (2010b: 180), a reality upon which, however, they have lost any agency: ‘Even Dachau’, notes Cippico, ‘would leave her cold’ (2010b: 180).

The depiction of the figureheads as the ones who have seen the Gorgon bear resem-blance to the portrayal of ‘the drowned’ described by Primo Levi in his book, The Drowned and the Saved (1989 [1988]), which contains his reflections on the Holocaust.

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As he reminds us in this important book, the ‘drowned’ are the ones whose humanity has been completely annihilated in the concentration camps: ‘those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it, or have returned mute’ (Levi, 1989 [1988]: 83−4); they are emptied-out shells who even before their physical death ‘had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves’ (1989 [1988]: 84). Similarly, the figurehead has become indifferent to what she perceives with her empty gaze: she has lost her ability to remember, and therefore she is unable to make moral judgements. Thus, she can constantly gaze upwards, towards the ‘unvarying horizon, on the disasters that are about to come from that horizon and which men cannot see’ (Magris, 2010b: 353−4).

Magris’s description of the figureheads might also be interpreted as a more terrifying and tragic rendition of Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus. Both figures are fixedly con-templating unbearable catastrophes, but whereas Benjamin’s angel is turning his head backwards, and, seeing the wreckage of history piling up higher and higher, would like to stop his flight, ‘would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’ (Benjamin, 1985 [1968]: 257), despite the storm of progress pushing him irre-sistibly towards the future, the figurehead moves forward with calm indifference. If Benjamin’s angel feels anguish for the victims of progress, the figurehead is the incarna-tion of a ‘superhuman force’ always propelled forward, which, like Arendt’s force of Nature or History, knows no remorse, only the inevitability of its course.

The complex image of the figurehead presented in this novel unveils Magris’s narra-tive practice: the necessity to look directly at the ‘authentic horror of reality’ (Magris, 1999b: 40) without using the oblique and reassuring reflection of the mirror conceived by Calvino and to travel, instead, ‘like Céline to the end of the night without sweetening the pill’ (1999b: 40). The disorienting and multilayered structure of the novel should not lead us to interpret it as an example of postmodern narrative that embraces self-reflective textual games, which intend only to unveil the meaninglessness of every philosophical foundation or ideology. Instead its narrative devices, with the multiplicity of unreliable voices, the collapsing of linear time, the precise references to other texts and historical events, its encyclopaedic and polyphonic features, can be traced back to the crisis of modernist literature that, while aiming towards totality, unveils its inadequacy and defi-ciency. As Magris noted, the novel should express ‘an ambitious effort, inevitably failed in its absolute aspiration, but only as such able to relate today’s world, its “delirium of many” as Musil defined contemporary life’ (Magris, 2010a: 46). In the same article he explains that he had first tried to narrate his story in a traditional linear manner, but that his efforts failed because ‘the truth of the broken, fragmented epoch’ (2010a: 46) could only be expressed through a disjointed narrative. In this sense it might be possible to insert Alla cieca within the neo-modern literary trends identified by Luperini as a novel that, by confronting contradictions, facing up to the horrors of history and not backing off from its ethical responsibilities, maintains alive its utopic humanistic drive to create meaning (Luperini, 2005: 63, 78).

Although the novel depicts the crisis and collapse of political ideals, it does not yield to a weak nihilism, nor does it argue in favour of a levelling of every belief and value. The defeat of Cippico and of his political creed, which, ‘had it prevailed, would have seen the birth of many more slave-camps in the world, created to crush free man like

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[him]’ (Magris 1999c: 185), does not signify that we should dismiss the core values of justice and equality that made him, like the real workers from Monfalcone, sacrifice so much for the utopic desire to construct a better world. Commenting on the tragic destiny of the ‘Monfalconesi’, Magris asserts: ‘it would be terrible if, when faith in “the god that failed” collapsed, those human qualities were to disappear with it – dedication to a public good, loyalty, courage – qualities which that very faith had helped to forge’ (1999c: 185).

In this novel we do not witness a playful interpretation or the levelling of disquieting themes, nor does the novel want to suggest a tragic aphasia in the presence of the horrify-ing events depicted. The broken and tormented voices of Cippico/Jorgensen, which sum-marize 200 years of European history, unveil an infernal world from which there is no escape. Their stories, however, also offer a possibility of knowledge of the world, of its multiple realities in which ideologies, differences, choices, good and evil, confront and question each others relentlessly. As Franco Rella has noted, it is only in the representa-tion of these irresolvable tensions that it might be possible to recuperate the ethical dimension of literature and to return, following Luperini’s expectation, to a sense of care for the world we inhabit. It is within the cracks of this broken world that – according to Magris – we might be able to get a glimpse of some kind of hope (1999a: 51).

Notes

1 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Italian are my own.2 Fukuyama, in his essay ‘The end of history?’ (1989), famously argued that the fall of the

Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union had unveiled ‘not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (1989: 4).

3 On the dissolution of normative foundations see Gianni Vattimo’s concept of ‘weak thought’ in Vattimo and Rovatti (1983) and Vattimo (1988). For a critique of Vattimo’s nihilism, see also Magris (1984: 471−81).

4 The book’s critical stance towards postmodern literature and especially its criticism of the postmodern intellectual has generated an interesting debate. See the introduction of Antonello and Mussgnug (2009: 1−29).

5 For an interpretation of the use of myth in Magris’s literary works, see Parmegiani (2011: 111−34)

6 See also Magris (1984: 471−81). Here he notes that:

the precariousness of the contemporary individual, which certainly keeps him from being a wholesome and compact classical figure, a solid marmoreal bust, does not turn him necessarily into a centrifugal bundle of stimuli or into a serialized stand-in for a character that is not there, according to the theories on the simulacrum which get carried away by masks that do not cover any face … If the individual is a fragmen-tary swarming, he is also the tension to go through that swarming and organize it; the individual’s identity is the process of his coming together, without which there is no happiness. (1984: 480−1)

7 Years later, back in Melbourne, he will meet an old comrade, who, referring to the events of Barcelona, will dismiss them completely: ‘No, I don’t remember anything important happen-ing in Barcelona, Comrade Luttmann said that time, walking with us at Battery Point, and trying to look thoughtfully out to sea’ (Magris, 2010b: 141).

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8 While many people from Istria were escaping Tito’s Yugoslavia into Italy, a large group of Italians, many of them metal workers from the city of Monfalcone, went to Yugoslavia at the end of World War II in a ‘counter-exodus’, motivated by their communist ideals. As Magris noted in the pages dedicated to Goli Otok in Microcosms, these men brought with them ‘their enthusiasm and their skills as workers and technicians in the shipyards and other industrial sectors … Unlike almost all men … they worked not to survive, rather they lived to work at the construction of a new order’ (Magris, 1999c: 182).

9 Once back in Italy, the ‘Monfalconesi’ workers who survived imprisonment ‘found them-selves, as communists, open to intimidation and sometimes aggression from Italian ultrana-tionalists. The police regarded them with suspicion, while the Italian Communist Party sought to sweep them under the carpet because with their unfailing loyalty they were unwanted evidence of the party’s one-time Stalinist and anti-Titoist policy, which was now a source of shame and embarrassment’ (Magris, 1999c: 185).

10 In her interviews with descendants of prisoners of Goli Otok Ballinger notes ‘the cli-mate of fear these events created (especially for the years 1948−1952) and the shamed silence that even family members of victims maintained … After their release, such a topic remained taboo within the family mirroring the overall silence surrounding this phenomenon’ (Ballinger, 2003 [2002]: 109). For different reasons neither the Soviet Union not the West wanted to draw attention to what was happening in Yugoslavia. The USSR wanted to keep its own gulags out of the public eye, while Europe and the West did not want to alienate Tito’s Yugoslavia once it broke away from the Soviet Union. On the history of Goli Otok and the fate of the ‘Monfalconesi’ see also Scotti (1991) and Berrini (2004). For a description of the complex Yugoslav history during World War II see Pavlowitch (2008).

11 As Claudio Magris pointed out in ‘The self that writes’, ‘the protagonist’s journey through the oceans and shipwrecks of history resembles that of the Argonauts in search of the – ever bloodstained – Golden Fleece, allegory of the banners that move to great enterprises and woeful crimes, of which love, too, is the victim’ (cited in Parmegiani, 2011: 119).

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Elena Coda is Associate Professor of Italian at Purdue University, where she teaches Italian and Comparative Literature. She specializes in modern and contemporary litera-ture with a particular emphasis on Triestine writers and contemporary poetry. She is the author of a book on Scipio Slataper (2007), and co-editor of The Promised Land: Italian Poetry After 1975 (1999) and Ballerininana (2010). She has published articles on vari-ous aspects of Triestine culture and literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Currently she is the Italian editor of Purdue Studies in Romance Languages.

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