Traveling Europe ‘through Time and against Time’: Persuasion and Eternal Con-temporariness in Claudio Magris’s Narratives

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Claudio Magris’s reflections on time by interrogating two time-related notions from which his entire narrative oeuvre develops: the idea of eternal con-temporariness and his reworking of Carlo Michelstaedter’s concept of ‘persuasion’. Furthermore, it aims to explore the implications of these notions for the ways in which Magris revisits and represents both the familiar and the less familiar places that make up the fabric of his literary journeys. The discussion of Magris’s use of the two notions of time begins with Danube, where he recounts the experiences of the traveler-narrator on the vast itinerary from the river’s source to the Black Sea. Following the curved and sinuous path that runs parallel to the Danube’s riverbanks, the traveler-narrator records his reflections on the ways in which the historical and intellectual European figures, as well as the ordinary characters around which the book centers, have dealt with the experience of time. In his two later novels, Microcosms and Blindly, Magris picks up the theme of reflection again as it continues to shape his wanderings through global and familiar places. In the short stories of Tempo curvo a Krems [Curving time in Krems], in contrast, the aging characters have somehow come to a standstill after migrating from Central and Eastern Europe to northern Italy. Here, Magris seems to take a different perspective, since the elderly protagonists have renounced the search for persuasion and tend to withdraw from life. At the same time, however, the narrator’s conjectures from the seashore again lead the reader back to the very beginning of Magris’s long-life literary journey “through time and against time.” By evoking the image of the river’s delta and the narrator’s sense of uncertainty when the latter faces the open sea, Magris reaffirms once again the importance of preserving a sense of the beyond through which to discover the complexity and uncertainty of one’s own identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Magris
• time
• persuasion
• memory
• Europe

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. For the use and meaning of the terms ’Central Europe’ and ’Mitteleuropa,’ see Pireddu, Works of Claudio Magris, 53: “[T]he concept of Mitteleuropa does not overlap with the idea of ‘Central Europe,’ although they seem to have the same meaning. A very controversial term, Central Europe refers to a predominantly geographical notion, and, especially after the Second World War, a geopolitical one, generally associated with countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary, mainly communist states with cultural ties to Western Europe. For its part, Mitteleuropa connotes a wider cultural area that also includes Austria and Germany and that hence, for Magris implies certain unifying historical, political, and cultural elements shared by cities like Vienna, Trieste, Berlin, Budapest, Zagreb, and Krakow […].”

^2. Magris, Danube, 59. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

^3. Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric.

^4. For more on Michelstaedter’s biography, see Depew, Valentino, and Sartini Blum, “Introduction,” ix–x; Bini, Carlo Michelstaedter, xi–xiii.

^5. Michelstaedter completed the dissertation at the Faculty of Letters of the Institute of Higher Studies in Florence and submitted it on 16 October 1910, the day before committing suicide at the age of 23. Its full title was “The Concepts of Persuasion and Rhetoric in Plato and Aristotle,” which might give the impression of a conventional academic piece, though nothing is less true. Apart from one brief chapter, Michelstaedter’s work does not deal with Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of rhetoric (as a means of persuasion). Instead, Michelstaedter develops a highly personal discourse and style. He does discuss the relationship between ‘persuasion’ and ‘rhetoric,’ but from a different perspective—by engaging with the pre-Socratic philosophers and the Athenian tragedians and by drawing on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Leopardi and others. By doing so, Michelstaedter questioned the dominant view of rhetoric held at the time—that of Croce and of other neo-Hegelian idealists. See Depew, Valentino, and Sartini Blum, “Introduction”; Rinaldi, Italian Idealism.

^6. Depew, Valentino, and Sartini Blum, “Introduction,” xiii.

^7. Harrison, “Carlo Michelstaedter.”

^8. Ibid.

^9. Depew, Valentino, and Sartini Blum, “Introduction,” xiv.

^10. Angelucci, Words against Words, 2.

^11. Ibid., 27 n. 11.

^12. Bini, “Carlo Michelstaedter Today,” 7.

^13. Taviani, “Attualità di Michelstaedter,” 321.

^14. Magris, Journeying, 12.

^15. In the English translation of Danubio, ‘persuasione’ is translated as ‘conviction.’ In the Italian version, the closing sentence of the paragraph is the last verse of a Venetian song cited by Michelstaedter in Persuasion and Rhetoric, 41–42: “We hope stones / turn to loaves / so the poor / can eat them. We hope water / turns to champagne / because no one grumbles / when he’s rejoicing. We hope, hoping / the time will come / when we all fall apart / so we won’t hope anymore.”

^16. For an analysis of the temporal and spatial implications of Enrico Mreule’s search for ‘persuasion,’ see Pireddu, Works of Claudio Magris, 24–28.

^17. Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric, 7–11.

^18. On this point, see Michelstaedter, Poesie.

^19. For an in-depth analysis of the intertextual relations of Danube with Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, see Dupré, Per un’epica del quotidiano, 87–90.

^20. Genette, Figures III, 230–31.

^21. Magris, Journeying, 12.

^22. In the fourth part of Danube, the lexemes ‘dusk’ and ‘shipwreck’ often recur. Moreover, the narrator visits four graveyards and hints at as many suicide cases.

^23. In this regard, Magris furthermore speaks of the “religious yet irreverent Viennese familiarity with death” (Danube, 191).

^24. Pireddu, Works of Claudio Magris, 54.

^25. Tallini, “‘Una metafora della complessità’.”

^26. See Magris, Danube, 294–95: “The largest group of colonists was German, summoned in the eighteenth century by Maria Theresa and Joseph II. Most of them came from Swabia, the Palatinate or the Rhineland, descending the Danube on the Ulm barges. They were tough, hard-working peasants who transformed unhealthy marshlands into fertile soil.”

^27. Morpurgo-Tagliabue, “Deduzioni letterarie,” 132.

^28. Magris, Microcosms, 264. Hereafter page references are cited in the text. See also Magris, Journeying, 21: “There are journeys made before and after the fall of communism. There are journeys through the world which, for me, are viewed primarily through the eyes of Marisa, and journeys through a world so profoundly changed, for me, which were more difficult to appreciate, after her death.”

^29. Magris, Blindly, 94.

^30. Musarra-Schrøder, “La geografia della Storia,” 123.

^31. Magris, Journeying, 12.

^32. Magris, Tempo curvo a Krems, 83. Hereafter page references are cited in the text. All citations are from the Italian edition, except for the story that gives the collection its name, “Curving Time in Krems,” translated by Anne Milano Appel.

^33. Magris, Journeying, 12.

^34. Magris, “Curving Time in Krems.”

^35. Roth, “Essay und Essayismus,” 123. Musil speaks of “Faden der Erzählung” (“thread of the narration”) versus “unendliche verwobene Fläche” (“infinitely interwoven surface”).

^36. Magris, Journeying, 29.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalie Dupré

Natalie Dupré is Assistant Professor in Italian Literature and Translation at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Her main area of research is Italian border literature. She is the author of Per un’epica del quotidiano. La frontiera in Danubio di Claudio Magris (Franco Cesati, 2009), which focuses on the discursive construction of borders in literature through a close reading of Danubio. Currently she is the supervisor of the research project “Transcultural Memories through a Jewish Lens: Remapping Italian Literatures of Migration.”