The Works of Claudio Magris: Temporary Homes, Mobile Identities, European Borders

Temporary Homes, Mobile Identities, European Borders

N. Pireddu

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137488046
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

Italian scholar, novelist, journalist, and philosopher Claudio Magris is among the most prominent of living European intellectuals. This study is the first comprehensive critical analysis of Magris's corpus for an English-speaking audience and addresses the crucial question of the return to humanism that is moving literature and theory forward.

1

Households of the Self

Abstract: Drawing from Bachelard and Heidegger’s theories, this chapter examines Magris’s conception of individual identity in connection with the motifs of home, language as dwelling place, and transience in the play Stadelmann, the narrative monologues You Will Therefore Understand and Voices, and the short novels A Different Sea and Il Conde. Magris’s attachment to the human and aesthetic value of home does not render the latter a stable, private site of non-negotiable inclusions and exclusions. Just like identity is “making” and not “being,” conquest and not permanent ownership, the supposed intimacy of the home is inseparable from the experience of the unknown. Through his characters’ inability to accept precariousness and change, Magris shows that clinging to stability amounts to destroying life itself.

Keywords: Gaston Bachelard; identity; language and being; Lei dunque capirà [You Will Therefore Understand]; Martin Heidegger and temporality; Stadelmann

Pireddu, Nicoletta. The Works of Claudio Magris: Temporary Homes, Mobile Identities, European Borders. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137488046.0004.

1.1Stadelmann: dwelling in the space of the “-ex”

Our identity is partly made up of places, of the streets where we have lived and left part of ourselves. (Magris Danube 215)

According to Gaston Bachelard, in the life of an individual “the house thrusts aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul” (Bachelard Poetics 6–7). Defined by many physical and symbolic dwelling places, from real houses and cities, to nations, languages, and cultures, Claudio Magris and his literary characters find images of intimacy in the house, precisely not simply as a result of mnemonic activity but also as a productive, creative force blending the real and the unreal, in a synergy of signification and symbolization. However, their attachment to the human value of the abode as a space to be loved and “defended against adverse forces” (xxxv) does not translate, as in Bachelard, into a stable, private site that determines non-negotiable inclusions and exclusions, setting up ideological or emotional differences with what is not home. As Magris explains in his essay “Personaggi dalla biografia imperfetta,” when he decided to visit the real home of Enrico Mreule—the protagonist of his short novel Un altro mare (A Different Sea)—he was in search of those tiny objects and negligible private details from which the epiphany of a life can emerge. In fact, however, despite his immersion into that domestic world, Magris avows that the only biographies he can write of his characters are invented accounts, marked by incompleteness and fragmentariness (Magris “Personaggi” 618).

As in the mythical Homeric episode, coming back home “after an odyssey of many years” (Poetics 15) allows Bachelard to recover the same, faultless repertoire of memories and feelings. The dynamic relationship between journey and homecoming, lived experiences and their recollections, is equally crucial to Magris, for whom, however, the recovery of the domestic sphere that grants Ulysses respect and stability in Ithaca is inseparable from a “beyond,” which not only is inscribed in the title of one of his essay collections, Itaca e oltre, but also informs his overall poetics.¹ The Homeric hero’s journey is an itinerary that, from the unknown, leads back and ascribes truthfulness to the familiar precisely at the end, as a point of arrival, rather than a departure, and it is precisely the return home that consolidates the traveler’s identity. However, our own Odyssey today is different. To the traditional, circular Ulyssean epos, which for Magris underlies the total, organic Romantic conception of the world that prompts Novalis to imagine the subject always homeward bound, Magris opposes the contemporary “rectilinear odyssey” (Itaca 47), a nomadism without Ithaca, prompted by a perpetual interrogation of the world. The modern Ulysses for Magris does not go back home confirmed in his own identity. He disperses and is estranged from himself, unable to recognize himself in the many faces he puts on and abandons in his centrifugal run, lost on the road toward infinity or nothingness (Utopia 59).

In addition to discovering and disclosing the precariousness of the world and of the individual self, travel for Magris “teaches us how to inhabit more freely, more poetically our own home” (Infinito x). The contemporary Ulysses is always a stranger and a guest, who feels simultaneously in the unknown and at home, and, by learning to be “Nobody” (x), he understands that it is never truly possible to own home and identity like properties but only humbly to station in them, be it for one night or for an entire life. Magris here not only evokes the status viatoris that connotes life as an earthly journey into finitude. By revising the staticity of the loyal Ulysses who yearns to go home and settle, he elaborates a notion of individual and collective identity in terms of temporary homes. Both the domestic hearth and the national birthplace for him are not rigid spaces to be mourned nostalgically through the lens of temporal or geographical distance but, rather, destinations shaped by the traveler’s own path and transformations. As we read in his book-length essay on exile in Eastern European Jewish literature—Lontano da dove—it is precisely the failed prospect of a return that, however painful, can divest the individual of any “falsifying garment” (Lontano 83).

The 1988 play Stadelmann well demonstrates that, in Magris’s poetics of domestic space, Tuan and Bachelard’s notion of topophilia can hence function only with the awareness that recollections of comforting retreats cannot provide real relief for the present and do not offer, either, an undisturbed day-dream back into the allegedly felicitous past. The birthplace that we nostalgically look for in our bygone childhood can in fact be found only at the end of our homeward journey (Infinito xi), a journey which, however, does not conclude with circularity. The eponymous protagonist of the play is Goethe’s former servant, Johann Carl Wilhelm Stadelmann, now old and forgotten, living in a poorhouse in Jena. Being among the very few surviving people who personally knew Goethe, Stadelmann is invited to Frankfurt for the inauguration of Goethe’s monument. Back home, he gets drunk and hangs himself. Although it is Goethe’s figure that hovers over Stadelmann, triggering the tension between the genius’s greatness and the servant’s marginality, this play is above all the stage of Stadelmann’s own reminiscences, a patchy history of the self that marks the passing of time with a blend of nostalgia and resentment, dreams and disillusionment.

Although “we think we know ourselves in time” (Bachelard Poetics 8), Bachelard observes, all we know in fact is “a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability—a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to ‘suspend’ its flight” (8). The function of space, for Bachelard, is precisely to compress time “in its countless alveoli” (8), which in Stadelmann are the spatial nooks of former dwellings that the protagonist retrieves through flashes of memory, looking in vain for self-confidence and self-consistency. Magris’s play seems to authenticate the function of the house as an intimate site where recollections can stage what for Bachelard is “the theater of the past” (8). In fact, however, through those very house images that, as in a sort of Bildungsroman, Bachelard unproblematically considers promoters of psychological integration, Stadelmann’s idealization of the past will fail.

After initially re-evoking a conversation between Goethe and his servant about the theory of colors, the play, indeed, shifts to a “squalid room, the parlor in the poorhouse at Jena” (Stadelmann 24) where an elderly and pensive Stadelmann further elaborates on those past memories. It is hence anything but Bachelard’s “felicitious space” (Poetics xxxv) that hosts the protagonist’s attempted self-recovery through recollections. Stadelmann clings to and settles in his personal household of the soul, the only abode that seems to allow him to define himself according to intimate personal experiences which, once materializing into his memory, disavow the reality of the present and cannot be shared with anybody else: “You need to have seen those colors, as I saw them myself—but who’s going to see them now, without him who will show them to me and explain them” (Stadelmann 25). Therefore, the “proofs” or “illusions of stability” (Poetics 17) that the body of images constituted by the house allegedly offers according to Bachelard do not help Stadelmann enjoy a “eulogized” (xxxv) domesticity. The events staged in Stadelmann’s recollections of his past and his personal interactions in the present continuously alter the nature and the psychological value of the domestic space, producing self-estrangement rather than a consistent “topography of our intimate being” (xxxvi). When the warden warns him to stay put—“Remember your place, Stadelmann” (Stadelmann 29)—in the Italian original, “State al vostro posto” (Stadelmann Garzanti 1988: 18), literally, “Stay in your place”—Stadelmann replies he would be glad to do so if only he knew what his place is. The inspector answers back by identifying Stadelmann’s accommodation in the poorhouse as his sole abode and labels him as an “ex-servant” (Stadelmann 30). He thus implies that the value of Stadelmann’s self is all gone, being attached uniquely to Stadelmann’s former role as Goethe’s attendant, and not applicable to his present status as a simple guest at the poorhouse. Yet, in his turn, Stadelmann reacts to this confining portrayal of his alleged current nothingness by specifying that “Everyone is an ex-, ex I don’t know what, so many aren’t even aware” (30).

Since, for Bachelard, “our soul is an abode” (Poetics xxxvii) and “by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms’ we learn to ‘abide within ourselves’ ” (xxxvii), the house images for him move in both directions: “they are in us as much as we are in them” (xxxvii). Yet, the exchanges between Magris’s two characters generate conflicting interpretations of the connection of self and space. As the tension between “servant” and “ex-servant” in the previous repartee shows, Stadelmann thinks of himself as displaced in time and space, and considers his identity more than what his self is in the present moment, whereas the inspector limits Stadelmann by making his identity coincide only with those features that can and must be compatible with Stadelmann’s current status. For the inspector, Stadelmann has lost a part of himself. For Stadelmann, however, every facet of the self survives, even though he realizes that everybody is something different from the past because we all share a condition of constant fluidity that affects the self as much as its spaces—its dwelling place in particular.

As though trying to recapture the virtues of Bachelard’s shelter embodying the dreams and hopes of an identitarian continuity through time and space, Stadelmann defends his self-consistency by claiming, ironically, that in his life “it seems as if there was never anything new” (Stadelmann 38), and that precisely for that reason he never forgets anything. Yet, this conviction is at odds with pronouncements he recalls from Goethe, for whom there was no room for memory, as “there is no past of which to be nostalgic, everything is always eternally new” (38). For his part, the barber who prepares Stadelmann for his trip to Frankfurt for the inauguration of Goethe’s monument seems to endorse permanence by remarking the difference between, on the one hand, the multifarious natural expressions of the human face—“a temporary face” (54)—and, on the other, an “ideal” (54) and “classic face” (54), an artifact “good for all occasions and uses” (54). Yet, significantly, the barber himself associates his ability to refashion the ephemeral instant into an eternal self-same to the art of laying out corpses for funerals, erasing the action of change by turning the human face into “a funeral mask” (54). Fluidity, change, temporality are exorcized at the price of life itself, an uncanny prefiguration of the play’s ending, when Stadelmann takes his own life. Paradoxically, death crystallizes the human being in the very moment it decrees its end, its inexorable transience. Perversely, this will also be the moment when Stadelmann is offered a more reliable home and an annuity, both signs of material and emotional stability and continuity which he cannot expect to obtain in life. The surrounding “empty walls” (57) at which he ends up looking “as you look at a mirror” (57) are themselves a somber reminder of the “nothing” (57) that connects the abode and the self in Stadelmann’s perception, both being expressions of privation, trespass, absence.

By mingling recollections and desires, truthful and imaginary details in their interaction with Stadelmann, the female figures in the play seem at first to substantiate what Bachelard presents as the cooperation of “the function of the real and the function of the unreal” (Poetics xxxv) in the human psyche. Bachelard’s “poetics of the home” (xxxv) as “the space we love” (xxxv) assumes that the experience of the past, which memory grounds in positivity, has to be complemented with the alleged unreality of imagination as an equally productive force facing the future. However, Stadelmann’s search for self-identity through the emotional reconstruction of a consistent domestic space associated with the women who crossed his path ultimately fails to recover the reassuring human value of intimate spaces and to defend them against temporal disaggregation and self-estrangement. It is the reverie of Steffi’s past house—“it would be wonderful instead to go to your house, to your house from the old days” (Stadelmann 44)—that in Stadelmann’s desires could offer him a protective, familiar shelter in lieu of the journey to Frankfurt that awaits him. What anguishes and destabilizes Stadelmann is precisely the geographical and emotional displacement that will compromise the stability and continuity he seeks.

As further compensation against the snares of the new and of the unknown, Stadelmann’s fantasy conjures up another hallucinatory scenario of pseudo-domesticity, that of Madame Schnips’s brothel, “a small way station for travelers who suffer from nostalgia” (33). This grotesque surrogate of the Bachelardian abode degrades the almost sacred coziness of domesticity to the experience of a vulgar and transitory intimacy. Significantly, in Stadelmann’s visions the brothel ultimately overlaps with the poorhouse, another reversed double of the home as the custodian of emotions. Although the pimp’s exclamation “The poorhouse is not a bordello and the bordello is not a poorhouse” (50) intends to separate the two places by accentuating their alleged deep differences, it shows with equal evidence how in fact the two places coincide in Stadelmann’s mind, both representing misleading substitutes for profound, lasting emotions. Yearning precisely for a home as a domestic hearth, Stadelmann is left only with two pale copies of it.

Nevertheless, the play demonstrates that, whereas Stadelmann’s emotional and mental universe coincides more and more precisely with the confining and ossified walls of the poorhouse, the outer world that Stadelmann had forgotten surprises him for its extension and heterogeneity, almost a reminder of the need to reside in one’s own self as in a temporary home, the locus of identitarian fluidity. This idea emerges more consistently toward the end of the play, precisely when exposure to external memories creates a breach in the walls of Stadelmann’s existential enclave. On the one hand, recalling his relationship with Goethe, Stadelmann seems to assert his identitarian autonomy and cogency, for instance when he claims he would not simply copy but actually write Goethe’s journal. On the other hand, he also recognizes that “there is always something, you can do everything but get on with living” (66), falling back into a desire for permanence as a prerequisite for the consistency of the self, although in fact the self is inevitably undermined by elements that modify its nature. This is what Stadelmann himself conveys when he observes that “A true German looks to Europe and to the world” (70) borrowing Goethe’s thoughts in the midst of a conversation with German interlocutors who support nationalistic closure. Although the Germans fanatically extol their homeland, Stadelmann upholds the wider value of humanity, hence endorsing once again his master’s mental openness according to which “Germans will never be a people” (55).

Goethe, however, also reminds Stadelmann that this penchant for cultural pluralism is incompatible with self-consistency. When Stadelmann hears the knells of the grandfather clock inside the house and those sounds of domesticity make his master think about his childhood, Goethe replies that the past does not exist, hence disavowing the homely space her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Households of the Self
• 2  Homely Memories, Promised Homelands
• 3  European Thresholds and Relocations
• 4  From Snug Refuges to Ghastly Cells
• 5  Habitat and Habitus
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index