engleski

Where The Wild Things Are: Naturalizing Cultures in Claudio Magris' Travelogues

In my paper I compare two Claudio Magris’ narratives: Microcosms, (Microcosmi, Milano: Garzanti, 1998.) and A Different Sea (Un altro mare, Milano: Garzanti, 1991.) In Microcosms Magris offers textual testimonies focusing on micro borderlands in Istria and Italy. These texts are documents of so- called small histories, microhistorical narratives that are in a rather substantial dialogue with official History. While engaged in the aforementioned dialogue, Magris writes a mental travelogue starting in the woods of Monte Nevoso and ending in a Trieste famous café—the place where all the dis-membered ingredients of History are re- membered through the narratives that stem out of “life's minor characters”. Their worlds might be small, as Magris agree, but they are far from minor. Regardless whether voluntarily or contextually stripped of power that envelops official History’s stories, small but brilliant scattered points articulated in flashes spontaneously reflect the meaningful, the unrepeatable significance of every existence. The other book whose fragments highlight the importance as well as the corrective energy of countermemory and counterhistory as depicted in microhistorical narratives, A Different Sea, tells a story of Enrico, a young intellectual, who leaves the multicultural and multi ethnic Austro-Hungarian city of Gorizia for Patagonia. Like Prospero (The Tempest) who entered his insular exile dragging his whole library using it as the cultural shield in the ‘wilderness’ Enrico leaves the cultural safety of Mediterranean enforced by the ancient Greek texts. In order to examine the role of arbitrariness in ‘naturalizing’ culture(s) and thus drawing a power- based-hierarchy that grades cultures from ‘primitive’ ones to those of ‘high’ and ‘noble’ values I will compare two episodes from Magris’ respective narratives: “Apsyrtides” (Microcosms) and “Mare Tenebrarum” ( A Different Sea). Filled with “positive bias” (to term it hermeneutically) Magris the author grades cultures presupposing the primate of the Mediterranean in relation to its Transatlantic counterparts. At the same time, when depicting the micro and macro worlds of their travels, his characters seem to be less hierarchical in their apprehension of newly encountered worlds and therefore more ‘horizontal’ in ascribing values to the sites of their encounters.

Mediterranean, island, insular, cosmopolitan

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