The hybrids of Claudio Magris

Dictators and murmurs

This essay argues that Claudio Magris’s early novels, Inferences from a Sabre (1991), and A Different Sea (1993), deliberately mingle genres in order to disrupt systems of knowing and the power they enforce. Of Magris’s many novels and non-fiction works, these two texts focus most acutely on the legacy of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and reflect Magris’s eulogizing of a political arrangement capable of abiding difference rather than seeking to reconcile or unify it. Inferences from a Sabre meditates on the historical account of General Peter Krasnov and his army of Cossacks, who allied with the Nazis during World War II in return for the promise of a new homeland in Europe. The novel is told from the point of view of Father Guido, an expert on the Krasnov archive, on the history, the sources and the rumours about Krasnov’s character. A Different Sea recounts the life of Enrico Mreule, a young intellectual and disciple of philosopher, Carlo Michelstaedter – ‘a genuine poet and philosopher, who lived from 1887 to 1919’ (Scarpa, 1996: 192) – who attempts to live an ideologically pure life, according to the precepts of Michelstaedter, in Patagonia, before returning to the Gorizia region, where he dies in 1959, having witnessed the worst of the twentieth century from the safety of his philosophical remove. Both novels, based on historically verifiable subjects – Krasnov and Enrico – deploy a range of genres in bringing their stories to the reader – biography and autobiography, letters, the novel, the philosophical and scholarly essay, and historiography. The ruptures between these genres disclose Magris’s interest in the way genre enforces a certain world view, and the importance of the capacity – derived from his interest in the ‘Habsburger Mythos’ (Ingalsbe, 1992: 47) – to accommodate intra-generic variance, multiplicity, even contradiction, instantiating an unsettled writing, somewhere on the border between certainty and doubt. The ramifications of this, of course, go beyond a particular moment in history, though they are nonetheless grounded in Magris’s examination of a politics of open-endedness and inquiry drawn from his fascination with the Habsburg empire and its legacy. His signal contribution in these two novels is a critique of the politics of genre that is also a critique of totalitarian politics.

English-language reviewers of Magris frequently make note of his genre hybridity: how his texts never settle into distinct genres, opening on meaning rather than enforcing it. Ruth Pavey remarks on the ‘absolute seamlessness between fact and fiction’ in her review of A Different Sea, suggesting not only how ‘lightly’ Magris ‘delivers his erudition’ (Pavey, 1993: 62), but also the wariness his novels generate. John Banville’s review of Microcosms in The New York Review of Books, like his earlier review of Danube, opens with a direct treatment of the text’s troubled generic status: ‘It is easier to say what Microcosms is not than to say what it is’ (Banville, 2000: 46). He ends the brief discussion of the genres it evokes by saying ‘it is more than that [the sum of its genres], too; much, much more’ (2000: 46). Later on, Banville draws our attention to the way in which borders in Magris are not only geographical entities (including those of culture, modes of perception, and territorial myths and beliefs), but also aesthetic ones: metaphors for the ways in which they become ‘declaration[s] of an ideological stance’ (2000: 48), ones whose transgression attacks and destabilizes the artificial zones (or zones of ‘artifice’) that prop up ideology. Thus, Magris’s ‘excessive’ textuality, his overflowing of generic limits, has ideological implications. In a similar vein, Julia O’Faolain (1990) draws attention to the ways in which Inferences from a Sabre has as its central concern ‘thinking and feeling in the plural’, which is linked to Magris’s ambiguous narrative strategies. Pavey furthers this connection between ideology and narrative form in her review of the same novel, suggesting that it sets up a contrast between the hackneyed Romantic adventure stories written by Krasnov and his desire to ‘play them out’ (1990: 51) in real life, making reality accord with art; this, in opposition to the narrator, the retired priest Father Guido, who is fascinated by Krasnov’s story, and whose attempt to trace the events involving the Cossacks conveys a much messier, if not irreducible, relation between text and the real. Ronan Sheehan illuminates this conflict between the writing of genre and writing that strays from it in attempting to convey the messiness of historical reality: ‘In the 1920s and ’30s, Krasnov wrote historical romances with some success. The relationship between his writing and the military adventure is central to a story told by someone who is himself a kind of writer’ (Sheehan, 1991: 8). For Sheehan, the point of this ‘relationship’ is to ‘yield [the] meaning’ of history, to ‘affirm one’s life as it is’ (1991: 8), though of course the ‘is’ is precisely the trouble, since by the end of the text Father Guido’s attempts to bring order to the Krasnov archive yields too many questions, and suggests, in fact, that not only are the archives incomplete in relation to real events, but that the archive itself is a textual ‘reality’ that can be combined and recombined into various histories. This is, in fact, what Magris ‘celebrates’, tied as it is to his love of multiplicity, variety and the mingling of borders; his writing everywhere announces its interest in the ways ‘the frontier … is both bridge and barrier’ (Magris, 1993a: 72). It also suggests that text is not only a repository of the real, but that its gaps, uncertainties and questionable archival evidence are emblematic of our relation to locale, history and each other.

Such commentaries on Magris, however, do not fully elaborate his manipulations in the context of genre theory. Maurice Blanchot’s canonical work of genre theory, The Book to Come, suggests that the ruptures of the law of genre we witness in Magris – laws guaranteeing the coherence of a given genre and its difference from all others, as well as the reader’s expectations towards a given text – work to disturb the authoritarian impulse, as described in his sub-chapter, ‘The Dictator’:

To mere boundless murmuring, [the dictator] opposes the cleanness of the word of command; to the insinuation of the unheard, the shouted order; for the wandering cry of the ghost in Hamlet … he substitutes the fixed language of regal reason, which commands and never doubts. (Blanchot, 2003: 220–1)

It is exactly this ‘boundless murmuring’, ‘insinuation’, and ‘wandering cry’ that Magris prolongs, never settling his texts into the certainty of fact, the instrumental rigour of history, the ‘last word’ of legislated matter. Instead, he offers what Blanchot describes as ‘the experience of all art, what transforms powerlessness into power, turns error into a path and unspeaking speech into a silence from which it can truly speak and allow the origin to speak in it, without destroying humanity’ (2003: 221). The ‘origin’, for Blanchot is the death or darkness or ‘silence’ that calls language to being, but which language can only attain in its failure at attainment, or the lexical excess resulting from its attempt to pinpoint it precisely (Wall, 1999: 65). Being calls to language, but the result is only language always trying to ‘speak for’ being, and thus only ever language itself – a silencing of the ‘original’ silence of being itself. This interest in art as error, art as a silence, is connected to the cultural and political scene of these two novels, the end of the Habsburg period in Mitteleuropa and the dawning of both fascism and communism, so that Magris’s political critique is encoded within the generic hybridity of the works – disclosing the movement towards meaning embodied in Blanchot’s notion of art rather than his dictator’s constant arrival at meaning.

For Blanchot and, I will argue, Magris, the work of art is not finalized in a product – the book, the painting, the score – except as those products manifest their own unsatisfied desire for the ‘origin’, their inability to ever arrive at their goal. Art, as it is understood here, is the witnessing of a ‘transformation’, in which the materials of the work continually recall the ‘powerlessness’, the ‘error’ and the ‘unspeaking’ in which they originate, and which they openly cast as their opposites: illusions of ‘power’, ‘a path’ and true speech. In other words, art discloses the way in which aesthetic representation demonstrates the insufficiency of representation in the face of what calls it forth: unknowing, silence, the infinite. The insufficiency of any finite work in addressing the ‘boundless murmuring’ of a reality always in excess of given cultural, political, historical and scientific truths is the action Blanchot witnesses in art, an action that also poses a threat to the ‘absolute reality’ instantiated by the rhetoric of the dictator, which offers the assurance of finality in providing the ‘last word’ on reality. In contrast to this body of knowledge, which offers the illusion of speaking for, or guaranteeing, the sum of reality – taking ‘power’ over it – art is a dissatisfaction with all such finalities, truths or illusions of control. In this sense, art can only be a product insofar as it is a disowned one. Art is, in fact, the action of disowning products and production.

This is not to say that the products of art cannot be made to serve political ends. In fact, Inferences from a Sabre, detailing the brutality of wartime Europe, is exactly concerned with what happens when art instead becomes prescriptive, when it concretizes knowledge rather than continually exposing and thus undermining it. In this instance, art is misused and becomes part of the dictator’s propaganda, preemptively confining reality to the ‘text’ of a prescriptive rhetoric:

But I’m struck by the fact that an obsessive motif recurs in every aspect … of the story: one bumps into it continually, in characters and personalities who enter the scene straight off the pages of a book in which they have already lived and told their lives, and then, like the shadows of real bodies, find themselves going through motions already complete and consigned to memory. (Magris, 1991: 55)

Throughout Inferences from a Sabre, literature comes to service the ends of a Nazi war effort that co-opts the central characters, General Krasnov and the Cossacks, who fought for Hitler in return for the promise of a homeland carved out of one or another extant European country. In this sense, the romantic texts that Krasnov continually believes himself to be living and reliving become instrumentalized by Nazi ideology. What is ‘forgotten’ by Krasnov along the way – what he in fact ‘want[s] to forget’ in his quest for dominion – is precisely the way structures of knowledge are also structures of power, and of which literature, in continually subverting generic categories (the romantic novel among them), reminds us (Magris, 1991: 58). By willing himself to forget that a protagonist in a novel is precisely a ‘shadow’, that the life present in a text is not a ‘real body’, he permits his own history, his own agency, to be coopted by a Nazi ideology that controls his ‘motions’ in the real world as if his story had already been written, ‘complete and consigned to memory’. In a very direct way, then, Magris’s texts are narratives of genre itself, in the way they can be used to enforce and direct human relations in and with the real.

For Krasnov, the romantic novel – typified by the novels he himself has written, such as From Imperial Eagle to Red Flag – involves the usual gestures towards doomed heroism, foreign exoticism, fantastical exploits and the determination of history by individual fate (this in contrast to the Marxist history of Krasnov’s mortal enemies, the Bolsheviks, for whom mass struggle, class warfare and economics show how little the individual matters in history). Formally, its all-encompassing or monolithic narrative treatment of nations and peoples, the working out of history in an ultimate sense, its movement towards definitive conclusions, is likewise significant for the comforts it brings in an increasingly fragmented, confusing, and uncertain historical moment:

As [Krasnov] planned vague and glorious strategies, like his Kornilov [the hero of From Imperial Eagle to Red Flag], his own soldiers were being used by the Nazis for little auxiliary operations and hateful persecution, skirmishes, raids and confiscations, compelled to stand guard over the ruins of villages like Attimis, which had been razed by the Germans and the Fascists. (Magris, 1991: 58)

By projecting his genre, the romantic novel, onto the events surrounding him, and having such projections reinforced by Nazi promises, Krasnov is able to ignore and delude himself as to the sordidness and banality of his military actions. In doing so, he surrenders himself and his people to the dictates of an exploitative and totalitarian system. The fanaticism of his generic vision – the attempt to make reality accord with his genre of choice – sustains his instrumentality to the Nazi cause. Later on, he reflects upon the notion of the heroic individual, so much a part of fascist ideology, and although he knows it to be false, nonetheless accepts it utterly, and proceeds accordingly:

Without knowing it, Krasnov himself had passed judgment on the extreme exaggerated deeds of his old age when, decades earlier, he wrote in his most recent novel that men in their pride believe everything depends on them, even though, when all’s said and done, they are compelled to acknowledge that the great dimensions of history escape their will and are directed by an intelligence alien to our understanding.

Heedless of his own words, he now persuaded himself that everything depended on him – on the will, wisdom and courage of an Atamàn. Had he not, as if foretelling his own involuntary, papery fate, quoted himself in his own most celebrated novel, and introduced himself – as one character among others – in the part which he really had played, in 1918, during the civil war? Now, no longer an author freely creating but a novelish figure blindly obeying the plot of an author whose existence he didn’t even suspect, he recreated his role: a ham actor of his own defeat and captain of his own captivity. (1991: 59–60)

In this case, art is no longer the voice straying outside the instrumental language of power – into regions of silence, murmuring, error – but rather the voice of the dictator, enforcing a specific kind of vision in order to reinforce its own power over historical reality. Rather than continuing to acknowledge the ‘intelligence alien to our understanding’, he returns to the notion of individual ‘will’ guiding fate, so important to the Nazi ethos, and which, in turn, only makes him a pawn of larger forces that turn him into a ‘ham actor’, and ultimately a ‘captive’. Krasnov turns himself into a generic character in a generic novel, though the true author is not himself in this case, but the Reich to whom he has relinquished power, which is really a suspension of his awareness that all ‘understanding’, personal and collective, is at best partial. He allows the Nazis to turn him over to an ‘involuntary, papery fate’.

Textual meanderings

Genres, then, are places of power from which art strays by refusing to rest in a given structure of knowing, or, in Magris’s case, by purposefully mixing and hybridizing genres. This is not only Blanchot’s argument in The Book to Come (where the ultimate text is always a book to come, whose arrival is indefinitely postponed, since the advent of any literary text is a striving for a place beyond itself), but also that of John Frow, in his study, Genre (2006). Frow tells us that ‘genres organize verbal and non-verbal discourse, together with the actions that accompany them, and how they contribute to the social structuring of meaning’ (2006: 1). Like Blanchot, Frow finds in genre the work of internal laws that delimit and thereby govern meaning, wherein truth becomes the performance of a system. Moreover, in regarding genre as ‘a universal dimension of textuality’ (2006: 2), Frow demonstrates just how all-encompassing are the formulae that govern the organization of information, and thus meaning. There is much at stake here, as Frow suggests, since a given predisposition towards various kinds of text precedes any given encounter with text itself, preparing us in advance for how we read, interpret and act on information:

Generic structure both enables and restricts meaning, and is a basic condition for meaning to take place. I take it that genre theory is, or should be, about the ways in which different structures of meaning and truth are produced and by the various kinds of writing, talking, painting, filming and acting by which the universe of discourse is structured. (2006: 10)

Magris engages with Frow’s argument in presenting texts whose generic indeterminacy warns of the dangers of naïve responses to information, and (as I will argue in the case of Magris’s texts) the ways in which genres coopt their audiences.

The very last paragraph of A Different Sea gives a sense of how Magris continually disrupts the novelistic flow of the text to keep the reader from passively accepting its claims:

Ten years afterwards [following the death of Enrico and his immediate relatives], a new critical edition of the works of Michelstaedter is published and, because of its scholarly rigour and completeness, it becomes the definitive text. A note in the Episolario, later reprinted in a number of other publications, anticipates the passing of Enrico Mreule by twenty-six years, supposing him to have died at Umago in 1933. (Magris, 1993b: 104)

As this is the very last paragraph of the novel, its readers, rather than experiencing a sense of conclusiveness, are instead cast into doubt as to what kind of text they have read. If, as this last paragraph asserts, everything we have read has in some way been a reflection of careful scholarly and archival research, then there is nothing of fiction, and thus nothing of a novel, here at all. At the same time, scholarly research, by a sudden reversal, becomes fiction, since the ‘definitive’ text, listing Enrico’s death 26 years early, and in the wrong location, is in fact ‘made up’, which then casts suspicion on the veracity of all scholarship. Moreover, the assumption of the correctness of the definitive scholarly text leads to a proliferation of ‘other publications’ that compound the error. What we are reminded of, then, are the truth values encoded in specific genres, and how they predispose us towards their content. In the words of Blanchot, the ‘error’ in the ‘definitive’ text draws our attention to the capacity of any text to make the claim that its lexical reality is definitive; in other words, Magris uses non-fictional genres – in this case the scholarly monograph – in the service of Blanchot’s art. What Magris’s art leaves us with is a series of questions regarding the veracity of his text, the veracity of the texts he has consulted in arriving at his own, and the credulity we bring to various lexical categories. His art reminds us of how lexical ‘power’ operates, making us forget the disjunction between the language we bring to reality and reality itself, which is the very life of Blanchot’s ‘book’. For Magris, too, the definitive book is always ‘yet to come’.

Magris’s genre trespass – presenting fiction as non-fiction, non-fiction as fiction – blurs the boundaries of genre, displacing them from positions of authority, and illuminating the power we as readers lend them. But this illumination takes place not only in terms of the individual reading act, but also in terms of the greater historical, political and social contexts in which the novels are placed, and which suggest a kind of ‘mass reading’, itself shaped and enforced by genres, that led to many of the political and social nightmares Magris examines. As Loredana Polezzi astutely notes, the crossing of generic boundaries is not only a literary exercise for Magris, but a geo-political, if not epistemological, one as well (2001: 195). In Inferences from a Sabre, for example, he links the ‘concrete and serene reality of God’ (2001: 9), the inexplicable certainties of religious faith, to

piec[ing] together … the entire canvas of that tragic and grotesque occupation of Carnia by the Cossacks, who had allied themselves with the [Nazis] and whom the [Nazis] used for the most obnoxious and repellent jobs, deceiving them with impossible promises while inciting them to evil. (2001: 13)

By contrast, A Different Sea critiques the bourgeois values of a decaying Austro-Hungarian empire, investigating the ways in which the search for an authenticity free of political, cultural and social influence is really a disengagement hiding the basest self-preservation: ‘To keep to oneself and to turn to flame – that is true liberation from every single changeable thing’ (Magris, 1993b: 86). The novel’s protagonist, Enrico, utters this bit of pseudo-philosophy following a scene in which young partisans are hanged by Nazis, and outspoken friends are imprisoned or murdered in concentration camps; for his part, Enrico ‘says nothing’ in response (1993b: 88). Thus, for both texts, a desire for metaphysical completeness is allied to the fascist impulse ostensibly being opposed. It is precisely here, however, that Blanchot’s ‘silence’ interrupts the authoritative discourse – whether of Michelstaedter’s philosophy, Krasnov’s Romanticism, Nazism or communism – in which the imprecision of scholarship (gaps in sources, missing documentation, faulty or conflicting records) instead turn the plot of the traditional realist novel, reliant on character development and drama, towards the opening of the idea: invoking the difficulty of a continual vigilance against the power of instrumental language, whether it be of philosophy, literature, history or politics. By blurring the boundary between a text recounted strictly from imagination (fiction) and a text recounted from verifiable but incomplete sources (history), Magris breaks with the security of generic contracts to encourage readers to engage not so much with the production of meaning, but its suspension. They are called upon to awaken, as Father Guido suggests in Inferences from a Sabre, to ‘this unique and infinite present of events, in which shines our divine freedom to choose’ (Magris, 1991: 11), even if that choice, as he says later, is only ‘the great yes which we say to our own eclipse’ (1991: 84). In other words, this moment in the text charts a movement away from the security of the finite, the ‘no’ that serves the enclosure of order, authority and the ‘fixed language’ of genre against which Magris poses his irresolvable texts. This notion not only has political implications, but is grounded in Magris’s own interest in the irresolvable tensions of the late Austro-Hungarian empire, and how that state managed to continue for as long as it did precisely by embracing and managing irresolvability – which is not only a working principle in Magris, but an ethical imperative. So the individual reading position, one that recognizes in art the impossibility of managing reality in a manner consistent with genre, becomes the ‘art’ of an idealized political governance (drawn from but not congruent with the Habsburg empire), in which the ‘managers’ of reality turn from the strategies of Blanchot’s dictator and towards those in which the recognition of powerlessness is, paradoxically, the key to managing power.

Mitteleuropa

It is no accident that this mingling of borders – literal and figurative – is grounded very much in the Mitteleuropa, especially its Habsburg legacy, that occupies Magris’s work, either the larger geographical region, as in his book Danube (1986), or his more regional concerns, centred on the area including and surrounding the city of Trieste, in the novels A Different Sea and Inferences from a Sabre, and also the ‘microhistory’ of Microcosms (1997). As Richard Gott suggests in his review of A Different Sea, the text plays out the ‘sticky end’ of a culture that ‘bore within [itself] the seeds of [its] own decay’ (1993: 8), a comment echoed by Banville in suggesting that the novel ‘spans in a hundred pages the history of Mitteleuropa in this terrible century’ (1993: 36) For Nicholas Wroe, A Different Sea engages this Middle European culture and history primarily in its critique of the ‘increasingly dogmatic outlook’ linked to the ‘tumult of the world’ that followed the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy (Wroe, 1993: 22). The violent nationalisms, the political movements on both left and right, are both the outcome of the Austro-Hungarian empire, germinating within its society, and at the same time a result of its disintegration, which accounts for the dual currents of critique and nostalgia evident in Magris: ‘The only emotion of which Enrico seems capable is a deadly nostalgia’ (Shilling, 1993: 9). On the surface, this nostalgia seems to be for Enrico’s boyhood friendship with Nino and Carlo, but it is also emblematic of a ‘fin-de-siècle melancholy’ in which Middle European values end up undermining their own purpose, in which ‘self-sufficiency’ becomes ‘misanthropy’ and ‘freedom from … love’ becomes ‘panicky disgust’ (1993: 9), both of which resonate with the fascism and communist ideologies that emerged in the wake of the fin-de-siècle period.

We see the inversion of these values most clearly after Enrico’s marriage, when, as the owner of an estate, he fuses his nostalgic vision of Michelstaedter’s philosophy with an absolute and ruthless conformity to state law and a deference to legal codes stripped of all human sympathy, which parallels developments elsewhere in Europe at the time:

But for these hateful laws there would be all sorts of trouble. Enrico despises them but observes them to the letter … Let them [the local peasantry] realize that there is never anything to lose, not even those extra hens he has forced them to get rid of according to the rules … The stipulations must be rigorously observed, with all their implications of renunciation. Enrico fears neither man nor puma, nor the darkening bora that can crash down on a boat at sea. Yet the clauses and sub-clauses of a contract scare him witless. The law states that the tenant is to work the land he leases and share the produce equally with the owner. He is the owner and it is his duty to ensure the law’s fulfilment. It is not right, for example, for the children to pluck and eat the occasional piece of fruit from the tree, for that apple or that bunch of grapes does not feature in the final accounts. (Magris, 1993b: 73)

Here, Magris most openly connects Enrico’s devotion to Michelstaedter’s transcendental vision with a kind of bureaucratic sublime, in which the ‘sub-clauses of a contract’ are more real, more to be feared, than any natural catastrophe. For Enrico, the law itself becomes the manifestation of a transcendental vision, one of the contradictions upon which his character, and his society is skewered. The ‘final accounts’ must be correct down to the last apple. There must be an absolute accord between the law and reality, even if dictatorial means must be used to ensure this accord. ‘Nino’s attic’, the place where Enrico first absorbed Michelstaedter’s dictums, is connected to a human and maternal otherworldliness that is seen as false, out of touch with the harshness of a natural world that is, paradoxically, realized in the most rigid and artificial of societal codes, explicitly suggested in the provisioning of the various fruit trees on Enrico’s estate, and the prohibitions placed on the children. ‘Freedom’ here is inverted to mean steadfast obedience to ‘rules’ and ‘duties’, and ‘slavery’ is understood as questioning these. Thus, Michelstaedter’s philosophy of living an authentic existence becomes embodied in precisely its opposite: the rules and duties governed by an impersonal and anti-natural bureaucracy. It is not without irony, then, that earlier Magris writes of Enrico’s move to Umago:

On the 21st September 1933 Enrico transfers his place of residence from Gorizia to Umago in Istria. This change, recorded in the municipal archives, is one of the few irrefutable proofs of his existence … The registry records, however, are clear. (Magris, 1993b: 69)

In retrospect, the official records become similarly life-denying, since not only do they provide nothing of the life of Enrico, but, as we learn in the last paragraph of the novel, official records are never entirely trustworthy; they testify more to their own bureaucratic systems than to the life they purportedly record and enable. The state thus becomes the arbiter of an ‘essential’ existence, determining not only the laws, rules and duties we live by, but, by collapsing these with a transcendental nature, reality itself. The disappearance of any division between state and nature, bureaucracy and life, is enabled by the contradiction that permits laws to keep out nature, while also suggesting that laws are nature, a strategy that Scarpa perceptively calls an ‘increasing … dogmatism in Enrico’s outlook’ (1993b: 200). In other words, ‘dogma’ demands a separation between the social and the natural, which at the same time must be annulled, maintaining the categories only in order to collapse and supersede them in an endless recuperation of discursive power.

The fascist legacy of authenticity, purity and non-contamination is fully, though not explicitly, realized here: a principle of maintaining state power over nature by erecting absolute categories while at the same time masking how these categories are mutually reinforcing and interdependent. This guarantees the supremacy of the state by suggesting there is no nature except via its own power. Magris’s own attacks on categories are, by contrast, not to maintain his own power, but to demonstrate how all systems of power teeter on a contradiction whereby the principle of maintaining categorical purity can only be arrived at and maintained through contamination, in keeping with Derrida’s observation (2000) that the ‘law of genre’, which forbids transgression, can only be maintained – in fact this is the very principle of genre itself – if the individual ‘examples’ of genre belong and do not belong at one and the same time to that genre. In other words, in order for there to be such a thing as genre, the given works that belong to it must be distinct, different and individual in order for them to constitute a set of objects that belong (2000: 230). Difference is thus a precondition for belonging, and it is this difference, and its mingling to the point of indeterminacy, that Magris celebrates, in opposition to Enrico’s attempt at authenticity and purity by eliding the contradictions and paradoxes of his philosophy.

Enrico’s desire to connect the present with an idealized and philosophically pure past is part of Magris’s greater critique of Austrian literature following the collapse of the Habsburg empire, a time in which ‘harsh economic conditions, political turmoil and spiritual confusion’ (Ingalsbe, 1992: 48) led many Austrian writers to idealize the past. For these writers, ‘a quasi-Romantic vision emerges … as the lost Habsburg Empire is transfigured into an idyllic, secure, orderly fairy tale world’ (1992: 48), complete with the emergence of a middle class that defined itself by material possessions, whose material stability reflected a desire for political, cultural and historical stasis (1992: 50). This desire is certainly reflected in Enrico, whose attempt at arriving at an essential, fundamental, universal existence is enabled through the application of law in the material management of his estate. As Ingalsbe suggests, for Magris the fleißige, alte Beamte (hardworking old official) is the principal protagonist of the stories of the old Empire (1992: 51), and Enrico with his punctilious regard for the law and his accounts is nothing if not a kind of diligent civil servant, making sure that procedures are followed and ledgers kept in order (Magris, 1993b: 74). Similarly, Enrico’s disregard for contemporary political events, his remove from the political idealism of either fascism or communism, is part of that ‘futile’ effort to ‘stop time’ that characterizes the middle-class characters of the novels of the ‘Habsburger Mythos’ (Ingalsbe, 1992: 52). Since all political programmes lead to the same place for Enrico, there is no point in getting involved, and instead he prefers to watch the sea and keep ‘a detailed record of all expenses’ (Magris, 1993b: 79). For Enrico, the sea is the principle of changelessness, and permits him to turn his back on history (1993b: 84), displacing the bourgeois fetishism for commodities to a ‘natural’ source, yet in a way that evinces the same anxieties over social transformation. What he seeks, then, is ‘true liberation from every single changeable thing’, where ‘nothing is more changeable than man’ (1993: 86); thus his desire to step outside history becomes manifest in an extreme misanthropy derived from nostalgia and bureaucratic security, echoing Shilling’s claims (1993). The only difference between the Nazis Enrico meets, or the communist partisans and Soviet ideologues, is that while they take refuge from time in absolutist ideology, Enrico clings to an anti-ideology that, in practical terms, promises the same: freedom from the conflicts and uncertainties of history.

History in the present

This interest in ideological absolutes is of course connected to the rise of nationalist sentiment that marks the territories of post-Habsburg Mitteleuropa over the course of the twentieth century. Mark Thompson suggests as much when he quotes Magris’s statement on the rise of ‘diversities’ that are no longer appreciated in their regional and historical specificity – and thus as part of the many contingencies informing community in the region – but as ‘idolized’ and ‘absolute’ values (Thompson, 1999: 5). Banville seconds this observation by contending that ‘the most dangerous confusions arise when the border is not so much the dividing line between states as the declaration of an ideological stance’ (2000: 48). That is, borders no longer connect and make comparisons possible, but work to seal off a pure state from its contaminating ‘other’. However true this may be on the part of characters such as Krasnov and Enrico, fixated as they are on ideational purity, for Magris the genre borders he transgresses are not a principle of containment but the impossibility of such. Here, the line that demarcates is the line that joins, or joins precisely because it demarcates, and as such serves as the shifting ground of a peculiar ‘universalism’ that occupies Magris: that all definitions take place on a border, invoking by necessity the very thing they are constructed against, and thereby testifying to it. For Magris, then, diversity, variation and multiplicity are in fact our ‘universal’ status as historical, geographical and national subjects, and the attempt to lift any one state from the heterogeneity of its context and declare it absolute only reinstantiates the contamination that permits this operation.

This tension between context and containment is evident in Krasnov’s desire, throughout Inferences from a Sabre, to reconstitute the ‘rebellious, free-roving Cossack spirit … the rootless nomads’ stark and ephemeral homes; the impulse which fades away and is lost; the particularism of the Don, which bridles at every order, even from the Tsar’ (Magris, 1991: 63–4). Krasnov’s problem is that he wishes to reconstitute this lost nomadism through the very apparatus of ‘order, hierarchy and tradition’ embodied in ‘the law [of] the state’ he initially dreams of bringing into being ‘between central Ukraine and the Samara river, which would be called ‘Kosakia’, like an operetta’ (1991: 63). His desire for a country with absolute borders – an idea Magris mocks with the genre-identifier ‘operetta’, suggesting its small-scale, comedic ambition – is in precise opposition to the geographical mobility with which he characterizes his people as a nation. Attempting to reconcile rather than recognize this contradiction leads ‘him into mechanical servitude’ (1991: 63) and the sin ‘against faith’, in which faith ‘is irony, a grateful and affectionate sense of our own finitude, a consciousness of infinity which sets every boast in perspective’ (1991: 62). What Krasnov ultimately forgets is the ‘infinity’ against which we erect our ‘finitude’, and which should serve as a corrective to the historical transcendence that informs the illusory nationalism the Nazis exploit for their own purposes. His desire for a country makes him forget his nation, and this is precisely what Magris wants us to remember – the open and celebrated contradictions of mingled borders, where the Cossacks were at once a people in service to the Tsar, but also in defiance of him, where ‘their honor [lay] in disobeying him and their pride in not depending on him’ (1991: 64), even while they fought his battles. It was the very indeterminacy of the Cossack nation that lent it its character, and which was lost in the alliance with Nazism. This distinction is, in keeping with my discussion of the book, couched in metaphors of genre:

because fascism is above all this inability to discern the poetry in the hard and good prose of everyday, this quest for a false poetry, exaggerated and overwrought … Krasnov sought to defend adventure, the horseman and tradition through Nazism itself, the deadliest enemy of tradition and adventure, the totalitarian and technological beehive which levels life into a uniformity much more rigid than that imputed the democracies [Krasnov] despised. By placing his sabre at the service of the Third Reich, Krasnov turned it on himself, against his horsemen and those ineffable horizons of the steppe. (1991: 69)

The ‘false poetry’ of Nazism, described here as ‘exaggerated and overwrought’ (like the Romantic novels Krasnov writes), is false precisely for its artificiality, its attempt to seal itself off from the ‘prose of everyday’, the tradition and adventure characterized by ‘hard and good prose’. Instead, Nazism offers a ‘technological beehive which levels life into a uniformity’, offering ‘false poetry’. Here, it is as if a given genre were connected precisely to its opposite: ‘everyday prose’ to adventure, and ‘overwrought poetry’ to ‘uniformity’. What Magris demands, again, is an openness to contradiction, a willingness to recognize the irony in our futile attempts to guarantee an absolute, and which always ends up on the border that signifies the interdependence of opposites. Krasnov’s ‘sin’ is precisely this: a desire for absolutes free of the accommodation, uncertainty and ‘contamination’ entailed by historical context, and his refusal to act in relation to such contradictions even as he acknowledges them. Ultimately, he refuses to acknowledge the ironies in his position, and thus confines himself to an impossible and untenable existence:

The ironist is incapable of unconditional participation, because he is always at least partly on the outside. He is the counterpart of the propagandist, who manipulates representation in the service of an abstraction, for whom the spectacle of representation is a means of self-perpetuation. (Van der Linde, 2000: 72)

Refusing irony, Krasnov becomes the propagandist, but doubly so, for he reads his own literary productions not as literature (and as filled with irony as Magris’s own) but as propaganda; and he thus becomes seduced by his own efforts, attempting to perpetuate himself and his people as an abstraction rather than a historically contingent reality. In the end, he sacrifices himself to renewing that representation at the cost of the very thing represented.

Enrico’s problem is nearly identical. Hugo Barnacle draws attention to Enrico’s resistance to history in the title of A Different Sea:

The title may indicate that Enrico’s Atlantic crossing is symbolic, that even the most serious abstract concepts, like those kicked around by Socrates and friends on the shores of the civilized Med, cannot be carried far into the endless, unmanageable world of actuality. (Barnacle, 1993: 29)

This ‘unmanageable world of actuality’ links both novels, since in either case what Magris calls attention to is not only the difficulty of reducing world to text, or, in the case of his protagonists, making the world adhere to text, but also, as is the case with Father Guido, of even managing the ‘unmanageable world’ of various mutually contesting sources, bringing them together in the text of a novel in such a way that the very notion of the novel is compromised, rendered unstable and ultimately exploded, instantiating the unmanageable of the ‘world’ itself. The shifting scene of the world, its temporal fluidity, impossible to render in the static medium of print, is thus conveyed by Magris in the mobility of a text that is always poised on the neither/nor of some border that is fugitive, always in motion, never settling into the stable patterns on which genre relies. But Enrico wants a very ‘different sea’, a place without ‘the clock [he] pretends not to see’ (Magris, 1993b: 76), a place ‘without shores and furrowed by no keel; of a sun which, on such a sea, never alters and never sets; of a heaven inhabited not by Homer’s gods but by Plato’s ideal forms’ (1993b: 82). This sea, then, is a totality: timeless, unchanging, everywhere the same, an ideal perfection of platonic form. What he wants to escape is the ‘infinity’ of history that Magris immerses us in, the constant flux of material circumstance:

Biago can never understand Carlo. For Biago loves falling water, descending weight, flowing life – loves a life full of both greed and hunger, a life that changes and dissolves continually. As a poet he is capable of seeing God only in the sensual and the finite – things that always become something else; pitchers for drinking, mouths for kissing, greedy idols chanting the eternal psalm of their own intoxicating disappearance. (1993b: 82)

Alongside the absolute and ahistorical vision of Enrico’s mentor, Carlo Michelstaedter, Magris places a poet, Biago, whose vision of divinity rests on the border itself – the ‘intoxicating’ transformations undergone by ‘finite’ things in time, losing their edges, blurring their shapes, endlessly appearing and disappearing in transition from one thing to another, in a kind of instantiation of opposites that suggests change without absence, a border without separation. This is the poetry of Magris himself.

The politics of a microhistory

We return once again to Mitteleuropa. The love of heterogeneity, of the back and forth of borders, arises in Magris in the repeated references to an Austro-Hungarian empire ‘that did not wish to dilute its heterogeneity or resolve any of its contradictions, but rather to postpone their solution, that was content to fail … to find the founding principle of Austrian civilization and yet still to sing its praises’ (Hobson, 1989: 21). Here, the salient features of Mitteleuropa find their way into Magris’s aesthetic: heterogeneity, contradictions, postponement, the failure to fix ‘founding principles’. Richard Eder echoes these in referring to the ‘indeterminate empire, the imperfect accommodation, the blur of certainty’ (1989: BR3) in Magris’s treatment of the pre-war Austro-Hungarian empire. As A Different Sea and Inferences from a Sabre demonstrate, it is precisely the effort to counteract this indeterminacy, this imperfection, that leads to the horrific perfection of the Nazi and Communist regimes that followed, and which ‘marshalled’ central Europe by force into a ‘meaningless ‘bloc’ and without culture worthy of itself’ (Pryce-Jones, 1989: xiv). Gerhard van der Linde sees this abhorrence of hybridity, contamination and pollution at the very heart of the rise of extremist politics in Central Europe:

The possibility suggests itself that some of the distasteful and unmentionable debris which civilized Vienna would rather not think about is beginning to rise to the surface; that the heart of the Empire, symbol of stability and perennial well-being, centre of drama and music, is already contaminated, even poisoned. Horribile dictu, the poisonous debris may not be wholly alien to the elegant surface, may not be a completely foreign substance. (2000: 78–9)

The greatest fear leading to the rise of fascism is not only that Central Europe is ‘poisoned’, but that this poison is not ‘wholly alien’: that it is somehow intrinsic to the culture, that the very notion of empire depends upon it. It is this legacy of poison that haunts Central European politics between the wars, and likewise Krasnov and Enrico, who attempt to fashion their own ‘empires’ free of this taint, only to realize that without it they have only the emptiness of propagandistic representation or the ‘other’ sea of platonic forms completely divorced from the flux of life: ‘Nazi-Fascist spectacle is founded upon fabrication, counterfeit, pastiche’ (Van der Linde, 2000: 80). Krasnov and Enrico take shelter in discursive realities that are supposed to disclose a truer world, but that, in the end, mirror nothing but their idealistic obsessions and an abhorrence of indeterminacy. For Magris, then, a humanistic politics of nation, culture, and ultimately subjectivity, depends upon an acknowledged and even desired impurity: the presence of the border that continually de-situates the self. The rage for purity, for a place of absolutely established difference, is to lose rather than gain identity, to surrender to the immobility of a genre, understood here as a programmatic ideology. This, too, is a paradox of being on the border, that at the same time as one is, by virtue of the line, neither here nor there, or both here and there, the border also, by its very impurity, permits choice and thus agency. This agency is, of course, important to the dictator, who alone – as Krasnov does with the notion of the Cossack state, and Enrico with the bureaucratic organization of his estate – is permitted the freedom of establishing reality by simultaneously separating and fusing it to its ‘other’ (in one case nation with nomadism, in the other bureaucracy with nature), while the rest of us must abide by the law, except that exposing this operation – how purity is founded on impurity, nation on nomadism, bureaucracy on nature, genre on the hybrid – is the point of Magris’s novels: works that, in the words of Jonathan Keates, ‘[celebrate] the blurring and confusion of peoples, languages and national boundaries, and [show] how tradition and individuality survive in spite of, or because of, the muddle’ (1999: 27).

Thus, what Magris focuses on is less a programmatic solution to the ills of twentieth-century Mitteleuropa – a solution is precisely what is absent in these assessments of the regions around Trieste – but rather a disposition that permitted voice to hybridity and variance rather than attempting to impose a singular ethos on disparate national and cultural concerns. This is not to say the Austro-Hungarian empire enjoyed the benefits of an open, egalitarian multiculturalism. Magris is careful to remember the grievances of nations under the Habsburg overlords, but also to note the horrors of totalitarianism and intolerance that followed in the wake of their end. In any case, what he celebrates is not forms of government, but openness, exchange, communication and the richness of a vision in which the messiness, the unruliness, the incompatibility of life is celebrated. As Stuart Hood suggests, ‘What interests Magris are frontiers and the ambiguities which lines on a map cannot expunge. The way cultures co-exist, the way cultural microcosms have produced scholars, novelists and poets of distinction’, along with the central question posed by his work: ‘How valuable is local identity and how can it be preserved without falling into the dangerous clichés of local patriotism?’ (1999: 10). One might remove the word ‘local’ from this last question and further clarify Magris’s project as a warning on the dangers of confining identity to a set of predefined cultural, political or geographical coordinates, and of course the opposite danger of giving way to the levelling clichés of global capital (Magris, 1993a: 82). In either case, his works keeps us attendant to the importance of identity – personal, regional, national – but in the sense that it is always by necessity impure, improvised, contingent: ‘This state of being on the frontier, with its irreparable contradictions, made one feel with particular awareness the universal problem of identity, that is, the complex and contradictory nature of all identity – individual, cultural, national’ (1993a: 73). That genre plays a role in the endless negotiation that is identity is here quite clearly stated: ‘literature is the territory where we can go in search of ourselves when we do not know who we are’ (1993a: 73). His hybridizing of genre is therefore a structural metaphor for the act of identity itself as hybrid, multifaceted, implicated in its others. In both novels, violence results from trying to suppress the hybridity that attends the determination of the subject, the attempt to obscure the structuring paradigm that at once establishes difference through a collapsing of the same.

In this sense, the notion of ‘microhistory’, as articulated by Catherine O’Rawe, is a useful place to close, since it is in this kind of writing, less a genre than a meeting of genres, that we find an intersection of Magris’s concerns with history, region, genre and subjectivity. O’Rawe defines microhistory as an:

Attempt to write a local history through an emphasis on the particular, detailing the circumscribed or microcosmic place, in an enterprise which … falls somewhere between history and autobiography … Microhistorical writing is based primarily upon the use of documents and archival research into individual case histories; by means of this reduction in the scale of investigation, the original context can be carefully reconstructed, and through the accentuation of the life of the individual, more general phenomena can be revealed. (2003: 336)

Immediately apparent here is the inter-generic status of microhistorical writing, with an emphasis on an archival gathering of a heterogeneity of textual material (2003: 336–7) often considered beneath the notice of traditional historians, and of the finished text’s uncertain provenance, ‘somewhere between history and autobiography’. Magris’s interest in microhistory is connected, as a matter of course, to his interest in the centrifugal force of history, its ‘endless plurality’, the way it ‘gathers and disperses [so that] things continually lose their identity and become fragmented’ (Magris, 1993a: 77), a process at odds with the historian’s desire to find a unifying thread or encapsulating logic governing cause and effect in the historical process. Microhistory similarly offers ‘a challenge to traditional ideas of history as large-scale socio-economic chronicle’ (O’Rawe, 2003: 338). Instead, the focus is on ‘the act of reconstruction’ (2003: 338) itself, calling attention less to the history arrived at, than to how it can never be fully arrived at (2003: 343), or the process of bringing this material together, the challenges faced, the gaps one must, as it were, acknowledge. For O’Rawe, Magris’s work is as much about the spaces between knowledge as knowledge itself, about what ‘falls between the genres’ (2003: 339), exploring ‘the gaps in historical [chronicles], but also [being] unafraid to leave gaps’ (2003: 340), so that, in the end his texts refuse ‘to have the last word’ (2003: 343), since the elisions and slippages of the various genres and citations only suggest how much more there always is to recover, that the encapsulating narrative of history always founders on a plenitude that shifts the focus of writing from determination to process. This shift, rather than producing anxiety, produces a kind of joyful liberation at the heart of Magris’s texts, a wonder in the ‘obscure existences’ (Magris, 1993a: 78) of history. His writing thus serves ‘monuments to a lost culture within a work which is itself a textual monument to the same culture’ (O’Rawe, 2006: 152). By falling continually back into the obscurity that he attempts to illuminate, Magris – unlike Krasnov and Enrico – is not fighting against the inevitable contradictions of the border, but productively engaging with them. As he reminds us in the postscript to Inferences from a Sabre (a sentiment echoed in the sensibility running sub rosa through A Different Sea):

No story … ever ends, and this story too has had its little sequel in reality. Several Cossacks, some of whom have since become my friends, protested to the writer that he, sitting peacefully at his little table, should presume to interpret and explain to them a tragedy which they lived on their own skin; a former partisan, Ateo Borga, wrote an article defending the authenticity of the mythical, historically untenable version of Krasnov’s death in Carnia. (Magris, 1993b: 85)

Instead of Blanchot’s dictatorial shout, suggested by Borga’s article insisting on textual ‘authenticity’, Magris leaves us with the quiet whisper of the ellipses, the straying off into other possible versions of this story, the absence of conclusion, the opening not on ‘the other sea’, but on this one, always in flux, never staying within boundaries, but part of that boundary that joins certain knowledge to its gossamer other.