“Nelson brings the spyglass to his blindfolded eye, observes the carnage with the wrong eye, the blind one, and sees only the black (…) A blindfold is convenient, it helps you close an eye to the slaughter”.
This sentence seems to be the key of Claudio Magris last novel, a portrait of the contemporary society and its relationship with history. Too often we live blindly,“alla cieca”, without considering the bad that we are responsible for, both at a personal level and as part of a society. Like Nelson, we justify ourselves by pretending we haven’t seen and we couldn’t know…
Magris, writer and scholar, currently teaches literature and philosophy at the University of Trieste. He recently visited California with a tour coordinated by the IIC Los Angeles, which brought him to L.A. and Orange County. We interviewed him on his last novel Blindly (2005), recently translated into English by Anne Milano Appel, and on some of the many questions that the book unlocks.
The protagonist Salvatore Cippico (or Cipico, or still Cipiko, which obviously makes of him a citizen of many places and nowhere, an exiled) gives voice to history. Patient of a mental hospital close to Trieste, Salvatore offers his monologue to the readers.
Blindly is a novel that holds in it a cry for the history of the last centuries, for the blindness with which the society acts and behaves. But there’s in this cry an act of rebellion, a desire to raise again, a strong faith in some universal values that make us human.
This is an insight on the history of Europe seen through the personal experience both of the protagonist and of the author (many faces, one soul), and therefore true more than ever.
How much did your personal experience contributed to the writing of Blindly? What did you see, do, experience, that made you portray such a decaying humanity?
C.M.: For sure I was influenced by the fact that I was born and raised in Trieste, in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region; a border town contended and contaminated in the past by different nations. More than others I’ve experienced the consequences of the oppression of Italy on the Slavs and of the Slavic nationalism.
Then of course, there are personal experiences. Like the story of my deceased wife Marisa, who was from Fiume. In her book she told about her experience as an exile, and how she discovered a sense of belonging to a world she once saw as enemy.
And then my interest for the myth of the Golden Fleece and the Figurehead, the figure that could be found at the prow of ships in the past centuries, a symbol of women used as a metaphorical shield to protect men.
I feel the contradiction between my desire to find a meaning to history and the terrible irrationality of it all.
Blindly represents the conflict between Yes and No. I want to continue to say yes to life, but I know I can’t avoid confrontation with the darkness.
The fragmentation of the self, the fact that the protagonist of the novel has lost his identity, both his historical and personal identity, is the result of your existential and ideological loss, or is it a literary choice?
C.M.: I don’t think literary choices can exist on their own. We can’t write of something our mind doesn’t know. In fact, in this book I have used metaphors to tell stories I’ve experienced, or that are about to happen, or that somehow touched me roughly. So yes, this is definitely a confrontation with myself.
The story you tell ends with the XX century. If you had to extend it to the XXI century, would you still have the same approach to humanity, and what events would you include?
C.M.: It’s not a matter of facts and events. I think the XXI century put aside those important questions the previous society was trying to answer. It seems that, with the failure of the utopias that wanted to save the world, men have renounced to find another way.
I, on the contrary, am still questioning myself and the world, and that’s why I consider myself a modernist and not a post-modernist. I feel like Moses, who knows he won’t make it to the Promised Land, but never stops going toward that direction. I believe we all die before reaching our promised land, but I also believe very much in the importance of the path that leads to that.
What’s your opinion on the contemporary Italian culture and society? Do you also see that as decaying?
C.M.: I don’t think it’s possible to keep culture and society separated. We often make a mistake by identifying “culture” with certain kinds of knowledge, like arts, sociology, philosophy, which are instead not “more cultural” than other kinds of knowledge. Culture means in my opinion critical consciousness.
The new Italian middle class has lost all its values, even those that were not so good, but that somehow used to identify it. At least, the past middle class had an idea of what was good and what was wrong. Now we seem to be lost. Therefore, a lack of critical consciousness is a lack of culture, and of the harmony that derives from it.
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