25. June 10th '2021
“Non basta guardare, occorre guardare con occhi che vogliono vedere” | ‘It is not enough to look, one must look with eyes that want to see.‘
— Galileo
Claudio Magris is the kind of literary mind that we seem to be running out of quickly. A scholar, professor, novelist, columnist, travel writer—leaping across registers—he seems to have done it all without resorting to clever obscurities and theoretical smoke and mirrors that many of his intellectual contemporaries have often resorted to. His magisterial travel book called ‘Danube’—filled with subtleties, reflections, and historical nuances which spans centuries of European history and its uncertain present, written while Magris travelled along the Danube river which snakes through ‘Mittel Europa’—is a marvel of prose writing. It manages to be lucid in style and complex in content. His other recent works of fiction like ‘Blameless’ is another sort of beast—experimental (in comparison to the scrubbed-for-mass-consumption narrative novels manufactured in America and England) and yet is also a return to the oldest of concerns that European humanists of 20th century—Primo Levi, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell—have repeatedly returned to: the evils that political authoritarianism seduces us with. Only in ‘Blameless’—it was an evil that is periodically allowed to be renamed, refurbished with new identities, and returned to normal life.
Magris’ novel is about the peculiar set of circumstances at the end of World War 2, when Fascist and Nazi torturers, commanders, war profiteers, and executioners were allowed to simply melt away into everyday life under the auspices of the legal jargon terminology called ‘non luogo a procedere’ (‘no sufficient ground to take legal action, no cause to indict’). They may have killed and murdered, raped and tortured, but when the war ended many were simply deemed ‘Blameless’. The quest for peace and normalcy after six years of World War 2 meant allowing men who had metamorphosed to monsters to return home, abandon their old blood splattered uniforms and wipe clean their shoes of the gunk of human desperation they lorded over, and resume their life as shopkeepers, clerks, school teachers, and neighbors who would one day drop over to borrow some salt. The weight of litigating recriminations and seeking revenge was simply too much to bear. Everybody just wanted to move on. We have seen this time and again—this reluctant sacrifice by the victims of violence who pay for peace—in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Delhi, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Gujarat, and other places. ‘History’, Magris writes, ‘blinks eyes as blind as those of bats’.
Amid such works of gravity, breadth, and moral magnitude—each filled with the heaviness of history—for a few days I spent time reading Magris’ latest, which is the exact opposite in tone, presentation, and preoccupations. ‘Snapshots’ is a collection of his short pieces, originally in Italian, each two pages at most, on topics as diverse and commonplace as everyday life itself. What Magris brings to bear on to the pages is a willingness to think about the significance of things he writes about, which therefore turns the visible and mundane into a representative marked by portents and history. Thus, when we learn about a Russian model who stabbed a stray dog to death in the Moscow subway—an obscure event in a world awash with monumental cruelties— this wanton act by a beautiful tyrant becomes a ‘slash on the face of God’ in Magris’ words. Elsewhere in Stockholm, while seated in a bar Magris watches a group of Italian boys flirt with Swedish girls, when one of them manages to smooth talk his way into slipping his hand under a girl’s skirt. But suddenly, as the erotic possibilities begin to ascend in full view of all, the Italian boy is suddenly offended by the Swede’s cavalier attitude towards a medallion emblazoned with Mary the Mother of Jesus. The moment of Eros yields to irritation and a clash of civilizations. In Magris’ reading, the Roman cult of the Madonna of the European south was suddenly in battle with the austere Protestantism of the European north—thus laying bare, in a flash, centuries of religious disagreements on what constitutes the Sacred and from where emerged the Profane, even as fingers and minds remained slick with arousal.
Meanwhile, in Benares, Magris watches carefully the games of deception and pity that beggars—especially the child beggars among them—play expertly, as they tag along non-Indian visitors who have arrived to see God in that ancient city. But instead of God, these visitors are met by a cornucopia of religion, entrepreneurship, poverty, and an atmospherics indistinguishable from a carnival. This produces a certain wistfulness in Magris who writes about this reaity, “every representation of the unrepresentable Absolute is always [a] fraudulent desecration”.
This theme of the sacred being defiled—not in a religious sense, wherein it would warrant an opprobrium, but rather a steady erosion of ideal forms by the grossness of reality—is a constant in Magris’ writings. But this concern manifests and operates through ‘watching’. Magris is a great observer of people, of their small frustrations and resentments. Like many of his intellectual ancestors, at least since Freud, these events occasion him to read beyond the obvious. There is a natural tendency to psychologize every event with portents and unspoken desires. But this doesn’t mean, his writings devolve into sentimental pablum. He is also a shrewd reader of human self-deceptions. In another piece, Magris writes: “everyone is anguished and sensitive; we all are, so sensitive to the pain of others that we shove it aside so that it won’t ruin our appetite.”
Forty-eight such vignettes from every day life—where reflections are married to affability, profundity is marinated in a broth of humanity—come to us thanks to the excellent translations of Anne Milano Appel. ‘Snapshot’ is littered with throwaway phrases of great beauty. Magris’ prose and manner of thinking about the world has a certain nobility to it, a form of natural restraint that sees all but speaks with a wariness towards the coarsening of everyday life. As one slips in and out of ‘Snapshots’, we realize this attitude towards language and literature is in fact an aesthetic towards life itself. It can neither be taught nor copied. It can only be earned, after a lifetime dedicated to writing and, perhaps more importantly, rewriting. []