Un/doing Eurocentrism: Claudio Magris, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gao Xingjian

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes two works by Claudio Magris published in dialogue with two Nobel Prize laureates: Letteratura e ideologia [Literature and ideology] (2012) with Gao Xingjian, and La letteratura è la mia vendetta [Literature is my revenge] (2012) with Mario Vargas Llosa. These transnational and transcultural dialogues on writing practices can be understood as paradigm shifts on at least two levels: Magris’s European perspective of border poetics expands into a global perspective; and this leads to a decolonization of the concept of irrationality, which in modernity has mostly been attributed to alterity. The article illustrates the legitimacy of irrationality as part of human existence through a discussion of Vargas Llosa’s El Hablador (1987; The Storyteller, 1989) and Magris’s novel Non luogo a procedere (2015; Blameless, 2017), and the collection of stories Croce del Sud. Tre vite vere e improbabili [Southern cross: Three real and improbable lives] (2020).

KEYWORDS:

• Claudio Magris
• Mario Vargas Llosa
• Gao Xingjian
• ideology
• humanistic commitment
• decolonialization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Gao Xingjian was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, Vargas Llosa in 2010, and Magris was a candidate in 2007 and 2017 (cf. Smid, European Vistas, 2). In his response to Xingjian, Magris also names other Nobel Prize laureates to underline his argument: Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

^2. Borsò, “Claudio Magris’ Alla cieca,” 53.

^3. Cf. Hirschauer, “Un/doing Differences.”

^4. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 30–31.

^5. Cf. Rössner, “Einleitung,” 13–28.

^6. Haine, “Introduction,” 1–22.

^7. Praz, Illustrated History, 289.

^8. By authorship I mean the staging of authorship by various actors in the literary field, which leads to the formation of an author’s posture littéraire (cf. Meizoz, Postures I; Meizoz, Postures II).

^9. I refer to the following volumes: Il mito absburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna [The Habsburg myth in modern Austrian literature] (1963), Lontano da dove [Far from where] (1971), Dietro le parole [Behind the words] (1978), Itaca e oltre [Ithaca and beyond] (1982), L’anello di Clarisse [The ring of Clarisse] (1984), Utopia e disincanto [Utopia and disenchantment] (1999), L’infinito viaggiare [Infinite traveling] (2005), and Alfabeti [Alphabets] (2008).

^10. Magris stages himself (and is staged) as a Triestine coffeehouse writer: see Magris and Alloni, Comportati come se fossi felice, 133.

^11. The best-known example in the works of Magris is the first chapter “Caffè San Marco” in Microcosms (1999).

^12. Magris, “Mito absburgico,” 191.

^13. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6–7. I argue that coffeehouse culture today is replaced by an imagined community created by and through the media and associated with the particular habitus of its participants.

^14. Pireddu, Works of Claudio Magris, 84.

^15. Magris’s works of fiction are characterized by numerous strategies of crossing borders (cf. Magris, “Frontier Writings,” 151–61). Moreover, these themes are closely related to his numerous studies on Europe (cf. Magris, Literature, Law, and Europe, 13–27), as well as the essays on ethics and politics collected in La storia non è finita [History has not ended] (2006) and Livelli di guardia [Danger levels] (2011).

^16. Magris and Xingjian, Letteratura e ideologia; Xingjian, “Ideology and Literature,” 207–19; Magris, “Colors of Ideas,” 127–38.

^17. Xingjian, “Ideology and Literature,” 208, 211.

^18. Magris, citing Pamuk, “Colors of Ideas,” 133.

^19. Cf. Xingjian, “Ideology and Literature,” 212; Magris, “Colors of Ideas,” 130–31.

^20. Cf. Xingjian, “Ideology and Literature,” 212–13.

^21. Magris, “Colors of Ideas,” 132.

^22. Xingjian, “Ideology and Literature,” 208.

^23. Cf. Ibid., 208–9.

^24. Magris, “Colors of Ideas,” 134.

^25. Cf. Xingjian, “Ideology and Literature,” 207–8.

^26. Magris, “Colors of Ideas,” 130.

^27. Ibid., 131.

^28. Ibid., 136.

^29. Ibid.

^30. Ibid., 135.

^31. Cf. Xingjian, “Ideology and Literature,” 218.

^32. Cf. Magris, “Colors of Ideas,” 137–38.

^33. Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 146.

^34. Cf. Schmidt, “Rolle des Autors,” 90–92, and for my concept of “poeta moriturus.”

^35. Magris and Vargas Llosa, La letteratura è la mia vendetta, 20, 30.

^36. Ibid., 16.

^37. The ‘realistic’ style has a long tradition (see Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” 141–48). Magris establishes new parameters for contemporary ‘realistic’ writing.

^38. Magris and Vargas Llosa, La letteratura è la mia vendetta, 19.

^39. Ibid., 34, 36.

^40. In light of Magris’s poet(h)ics presented here, it is not surprising that autobiographical references enter his novels only in masked form, in order to maintain the distance between himself and the text. This is particularly true of his essay-novels Danube (1989) and Microcosms (1999).

^41. Magris and Vargas Llosa, La letteratura è la mia vendetta, 55.

^42. Ibid., 11.

^43. Cf. Ibid., 57–58.

^44. Ibid., 58.

^45. Cf. Magris, “Who Is on the Other Side,” 22–23.

^46. Ibid., 19–20.

^47. Magris and Vargas Llosa, La letteratura è la mia vendetta, 58. For further discussion of the dangers of monolithic identity politics, see Sandra Parmegiani’s essay “The Compass of Literature: Europe and the Mediterranean in Claudio Magris and Amin Maalouf” in this special issue.

^48. Magris and Vargas Llosa, La letteratura è la mia vendetta, 60.

^49. For further reflections on Magris’s concept of boundaries and his critique of (boundaryless) hybridity that lacks the cognitive tools to recognize and address boundaries as power structures, see Magris, “Who Is on the Other Side,” 8–25.

^50. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 36.

^51. Cf. Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller.

^52. Cf. Magris, Blameless.

^53. Ibid., 224.

^54. Ibid.

^55. On the social critique in Magris’s more recent novels, see also Smid, European Vistas, 100: “Works such as Blindly and Blameless, instead of confirming the myth of italiani brava gente, explicitly deal with one’s own responsibility for the darkest pages of recent history.”

^56. This book bears the truth, so important to Magris’s fiction, in its very title. ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ (cf. Magris and Ciccarelli, “Sette domande a Claudio Magris,” 410) is a formulaic phrase that Magris uses repeatedly in interviews to illustrate his writing philosophy. Magris, as noted, assumes that literature is to be understood as a dynamic collective dialogue.

^57. Cf. Magris, Croce del Sud.

^58. Ibid., 13.

^59. Ibid., 46.

^60. Ibid., 89.

^61. Cf. Mignolo, “Rhetoric of Modernity,” 453–54.

^62. For further discussion of Magris’s value-driven literature in the framework of normative ethics, see Simone Rebora’s essay “Magris Likes it Bad? Reflections on Ethics in a European Perspective” in this special issue.

^63. Mignolo, “Rhetoric of Modernity,” 459.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Linda Schmidt

Linda Schmidt is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Free University of Berlin. Her research focuses on transnational authorship analysis through textual comparisons of twentieth-century and contemporary Triestine and Hispanic American literature. Her method of mapping authorship through space and time establishes parameters of comparison that break down conventional approaches to the study of national literatures.