Blindly by Claudio Magris (Yale UP, 2012. Trans. from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel)Claudio Magris, one of the most respected contemporary European intellectuals, is virtually unknown in the US—that’s why the publication of his novel, Blindly, in Anne Milano Appel’s very skilful translation, is a welcome change.As all the reviewers have observed, it is hard to identify who the narrator in this novel is: is he “Comrade Cippico,” a Communist (not “anti-Communist,” as the book jacket wrongly states!) of Italian origin, who ends up, together with other Italian comrades in Tito’s gulag on the island of Goli Otok? Or is he Jorgen Jorgenson, a nineteenth-century adventurer with a twisted background, who is condemned to forced labor in Australia? As it becomes clear from early on, he is both: Magris creates a speaker of mixed identities and a listener (the man to whom he confesses, who might be a psychiatrist) equally ambiguous.Blindly is a challenging, intriguing and beautifully written novel, but, above all, it is a novel of ideas—hence the question: what’s the book’s message? A novel needn’t have a message, but this one clearly has one; the problem is that, although the ideas in it are easy to identify, the overall message is not. Since Comrade Cippico has been interned at Dachau before Goli Otok, we can assume that he represents the little man crushed by history from all sides, right and left, Nazis and Communists. But Cippico, who, like his comrades, is in search of “the golden fleece,” doesn’t abandon his search and his belief in communism, even after his horrific tortures in Tito’s gulag, and this is where the novel’s ambiguity becomes problematic. We don’t get the sense the Magris deconstructs this search, but rather, that he presents Cippico simply as a victim of, let’s call them some bad manipulators of history. Also, consider this reflection: “Those who want to keep man enslaved—like the Fascists, the Nazis, the capitalists…” Statements like this made me less enthusiastic than I might have been about this novel. I’m no fan of “the capitalists,” but to list them next to the Nazis, especially after having called Dachau “the apocalypse,” is the kind of rushed talk one expects from a righteous freshman, and not from someone with Magris’s credentials. Besides, what “capitalists” are we talking about here? People who have “capital”? Anyone with a bank account? (Yes, I am aware that the narrator doesn’t equal Magris, but since this is an ideologically-charged novel, the author’s own ideas are relevant, and the reader can often guess when he identifies with the character’s speech).A technique Magris uses is the contemporary rewriting of Greek myths and characters (the golden fleece is one of them). By inserting them in a contemporary setting he demystifies them and attempts to achieve some kind of universalization of his own characters and events: “the same old Charon going by the name of Daniel O’Leary; the ruse is successful, a facelift that makes him seem much younger…” This technique was very popular before WWII, in particular among French playwrights, such as Giraudoux—but today, this seems a bit outdated.Luckily, I was patient enough to read until the end, and at page 316, I stumbled upon this great passage: The fleece suffocates, it brings death to whoever touches it. . . . Every previous possessor, robbed by a subsequent one, is in turn a usurper who appropriated it unlawfully [aha! We are getting to the ‘lesson’!] Give it back to the animal, killed and flayed in homage to the gods always thirsting for blood; only on the sheep’s back was the fleece in its rightful place [Italics mine].”I confess, I wasn’t expecting this! This is definitely better than Giraudoux!
This is an unusual novel that has a poetic intensity. There is an unnamed first-person narrator ostensibly telling the story of his life to a 'Doctor', but he recounts experiences(usually of suffering)that range from 18th-century deportation to Australia to Dachau and a postWW2 prison in the former Yugoslavia, to Iceland. There are recurring references to the myth of Jason and the Argonauts and repeated invocations of ships' figureheads. It is left ambivalent whether the narrator is delusional, mistaking books he has read for his own direct experience, and is talking to his psychiatrist, or if he, as an everyman figure, has been repeatedly reincarnated.
Do You like book Blindly (2010)?
Salvatore Cippico tells his life of Italian-Australian partisan from the early 20th century to the 90s. His ideas ground by History and his body crushed by the torturers, he ends up old and insane in a psychiatric hospital. One lost battle after the other, he tells his doctor how he was sent to Dachau because he was communist, and then to a concentration camp in Yugoslavia because he was on Stalin's side when the alliance with Tito was broken. Of his love for figureheads and how they remember him of Maria, that he loved and abandoned when the Party asked him to do so. Of how once in his life he was among the torturers, too - when the communists slaughtered the anarchists during the civil war in Spain.But his story has to be disentangled from his delirium, where he is also Jorgen Jorgensen, a Danish adventurer that was king of Islands for two weeks and prisoner for most of the rest of his life, and finally one of the chiefs of the extermination of the aboriginal Australians. And where he is also Jason, who brings back the golden Fleece reddened by the blood of his sailors and of his enemies; and many more.The whole novel is written as the stream of consciousness of Cippico. Magris hides in it passages of great literature and reflections on the eternal war between the needs of History and those of individuals. It is hard not to be sucked into the vortex of the main character's thoughts and their quick pace - this makes the book quite a difficult read. Take your time to linger over the most intense passages.
—Yuri Faenza
