The Compass of Literature: Europe and the Mediterranean in Claudio Magris and Amin Maalouf

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the narratives of Claudio Magris and Amin Maalouf as a literature of identity, memory and testimony that seeks to foster social justice, dialogue and inclusivity in twenty-first-century Europe and the Mediterranean. In On Identity (Les Identités meurtrières, 1998) Maalouf investigates individual and collective identities, their elusive and treacherous dynamics, through a reflection that encompasses the Levant, the north-south Mediterranean divide and its endless permutations. Similarly, Magris’s fictional characters occupy liminal worlds in which identities contaminate, overlap, and often dissolve, while exclusivist belonging reveals itself as a deceptive chimera. In Blindly (Alla cieca, 2006), Magris explores the legacy of twentieth-century destructive identitarian myths and presents an alternative history that derives from inhabiting alterity, in a process that makes his characters privileged interpreters of the past, often brothers and sisters of the subversive castaways of history. Maalouf’s Balthasar’s Odyssey (Le Périple de Baldassare, 2000) spans the Middle East and Europe and scrutinizes their respective fault lines and connective tissues that solicit transcultural and composite approaches to identity. Balthasar records his permanent alterity by unceasingly questioning and adapting his own perception of the self in an ever-changing world, at a time of impending catastrophe. From the vantage point of Mitteleuropa, Mediterranean Europe, and the Levant, considered not as independent geopolitical entities, but as interconnected, rhizomatic geopolitical networks, the works of Maalouf and Magris emphasize the need to give voice to “other” accounts of history, to question our identitarian assumptions and to nurture the European project, a fragile, but irreplaceable possibility for a shared future.

KEYWORDS:

• Claudio Magris
• Amin Maalouf
• transculturalism
• liminal identities
• nationalism
• Mitteleuropa

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Magris, Acceptance Speech, the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, 2004. https://www.fpa.es/en/princess-of-asturias-awards/laureates/2004-claudio-magris.html?texto=acta&especifica=0.

^2. Maalouf, Acceptance Speech, the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, 2010. https://www.fpa.es/en/princess-of-asturias-awards/laureates/2010-amin-maalouf.html?texto=acta&especifica=0.

^3. I don’t use the terms “Mediterranean and European societies” as oppositional or mutually exclusive, but rather in their broad geopolitical connotations which often converge and overlap.

^4. In her thorough analysis of Magris’s conception of Mitteleuropa, Pireddu defines it as a “dislodged center” (Pireddu, Works of Claudio Magris, 52).

^5. Maalouf, Adrift, 216. Reflecting on empires of the distant past, Magris observes how “Great empires often defended identities more and better than medieval fragmented particularism” (Magris, “Identità ovvero incertezza,” 525).

^6. Pireddu, Works of Claudio Magris, 54.

^7. De Gasquet, “Claudio Magris.” https://www.lesechos.fr/weekend/livres-expositions/claudio-magris-on-assiste-a-une-forme-de-retour-sans-complexe-a-la-barbarie-1398881.

^8. Pireddu, Works of Claudio Magris, 54, 53, 54.

^9. In Origins, Maalouf reflects on how both empires “crumbled … into scores of miserable ethnic states whose murderous rumblings have caused two world wars and dozens of local wars, and have already corrupted the soul of the new millennium” (108). In Adrift he muses “about the fate of two large multiethnic states that were dismantled after the First World War: The Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose breakup resulted in tens of millions of victims and fostered the rise of some of the worst tyrannies of the modern age; and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, a process that continues to this day, and has cast a pall of terror and regression over all humanity” (215–16).

^10. Maalouf, Adrift, 20.

^11. Pappalardo, Modernism in Trieste, 8–9.

^12. Pireddu, “On Hercules’ Threshold,” 27.

^13. Maalouf, Adrift, 20.

^14. Ibid., 27.

^15. Maalouf, First Century after Beatrice, 171.

^16. In Adrift, Maalouf explains how small communities living in the Lebanese mountains under the Ottoman Empire sought foreign protection and support from vexing rulers: “[T]he Greek-Catholic community, of which my father was a member, sought refuge under the umbrella of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—and though this connection was largely symbolic, I still remember that an imposing framed portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph hung in one of the houses in our village” (61).

^17. Maalouf, On Identity, 13, 18–19.

^18. Magris, Danube, 297.

^19. Magris, “Identità ovvero incertezza,” 523.

^20. I am referring here to Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory. For an analysis of Blameless and multidirectional memory, see Parmegiani, “Remembering War.”

^21. Pireddu, “On Hercules’ Threshold,” 22, 23.

^22. Magris, “Identità ovvero incertezza,” 525.

^23. Maalouf, Adrift, 59.

^24. Maalouf, Adrift, 56, 59.

^25. Maalouf, On Identity, 31.

^26. Esposito, The Narrative Mediterranean, 40. Esposito’s notion originates from Paul Ricoeur’s theorization of ipse-identity and idem-identity and she explores the role of narrative in bridging, mediating and enhancing such mobility.

^27. Maalouf, On Identity, 86. Alejandro Santaflorentina notes how Maalouf’s way of building his family tree in Origins resembles a map rather than a tree: “Interestingly, the result of Maalouf’s method is not to identify an ancestor who produces descendants but a descendant who produces an infinity of ancestors—two parents, four grandparents, eight greatgrandparents and so on. This is why Maalouf’s genealogical reconstruction of his past is ‘ahierarchical’ and rhizomatic; it is an interconnected process that takes place in the author’s present and inevitably changes the way in which he perceives his own identity” (Santaflorentina, “A Genealogical Approach to Memory and Identity,” 29).

^28. The original title of Balthasar’s Odyssey was Le Périple de Baldassare, where “périple” privileges the mobility of the wanderer and the journey of the displaced and exiled rather than drawing a direct reference to Odysseus’ homebound travel.

^29. Maalouf, Balthasar’s Odyssey, 8. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

^30. Magris, Itaca e oltre, 47.

^31. Johae, “Transnational Identities,” 198.

^32. I would like to thank Julie Alusse for indicating these etymological connections.

^33. Qadiri, Postcolonial Fiction and Sacred Scripture, 50.

^34. Maalouf, Balthasar's Odyssey, 51.

^35. Ibid., 51, 54.

^36. Pireddu, “European Ulyssiads,” 269.

^37. Esposito, The Narrative Mediterranean, 49.

^38. For a treatment of the Phoenician conceptualization of nonnational Europe and of the Phoenician myth of the origin of Trieste, see Pappalardo, Modernism in Trieste.

^39. Esposito, The Narrative Mediterranean, 62. Esposito quotes Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 119.

^40. Kilbourn, W.G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption, 102.

^41. See Musarra-Schrøder, “I luoghi infernali della storia,” 105–7.

^42. Southgate, What Is History For, 120.

^43. Ibid., 120–21.

^44. Bauman, Europe: An Unfinished Adventure, 5.

^45. Ibid., 12.

^46. Pireddu, Works of Claudio Magris, 92, 7.

^47. Magris, Blindly, 5 (emphasis mine).

^48. Pireddu, Works of Claudio Magris, 99.

^49. Kilbourn, W.G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption, 96.

^50. Episto, The Narrative Mediterranean, 39.

^51. Bauman, Europe, an Unfinished Adventure, 136–37.

^52. Assmann, Is Time Out of Joint, 7, 92.

^53. Magris, Tempo curvo a Krems, 32.

^54. Ibid.

^55. Ibid., 83.

^56. Ibid., 77.

^57. Pappalardo, Modernism in Trieste, 3. See also Elena Coda’s article “From la Favilla to Claudio Magris: Trieste’s European Identity” in this special issue.

^58. Pappalardo, Modernism in Trieste, 12.

^59. Ibid., 36.

^60. Maalouf, Nos frères inattendus.

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Sandra Parmegiani

Sandra Parmegiani is Associate Professor of European Studies in the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Guelph, Canada. She has published work on Italian literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present, with a particular focus on Italian-English relations, Italian feminism, and the works of the contemporary Italian writer Claudio Magris. She is the editor of Quaderni d’Italianistica, the journal of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies.