Can we ever forget September 11, 2001, the start of a bloody century in which the mystical force of hatred and destruction has recovered its strength? Are Osama Bin Laden’s minions, the bloody Hamas-Hezbollah battalions, or troubled loners like Timothy McVeigh, Theodore Kaczysnki, and Anders Behring Breivik, the “heroes” of our contemporary nightmare? Is this the “rebel” response to an overly globalized, incoherent, and ultimately disturbing reality?
If so, their barbarism demands scrutiny — in relation to both historical precedent and to our modernity — rather than merely being labeled “monstrous” (though it certainly is that). The new religious militants, fighting in the name of their particular and peculiar God, seem as fanaticized as the Fascists, Nazis, and communists of earlier decades.
Magris’ main character is a rebel in more than one embodiment: as Salvatore Cipico, one of the inmates in the communist concentration camp in Yugoslavia; as Jurgen Jurgensen, ephemeral king of Iceland and a convict forced to build his own jail; and as Jason, the mythic adventurer searching for the volatile truth.
A multilayered and complex chronicle of the devastating tragedies of the twentieth century, Blinding is an insistent, informed, and irreplaceable incursion into the moving landscape of the human soul, its wounds and voids, its vitality and versatility, its deep distortions and its unpredictable dynamics. It is a fascinating story about the conflict between ideals and reality, or utopia and humanness; about being faithful to a cause and betraying it; and about sacrifice and solidarity. It is also a rich and original literary achievement that challenges today’s consumerist ethic. By renouncing simplicity, it repudiates today’s prevailing confusion of information with literature, of facts with creativity, and bestselling products with true works of art.
Another Genealogy
It seems that the notion of “identity”—with its many meanings and connotations — has evolved rapidly in our current environment into a slogan that, not only in public and political life but also in private, is used and abused as a miraculous key to solve any and all the difficulties of daily toil. Have you discovered your identity? Then you’re a forceful owner of a flag, a poster, if not an anthem too, with an invincible card of membership, obviously equipped to confront the far too many barriers in the competition for happiness, prosperity, self-esteem or many, again too many, other issues of the dreamlike project of achievements.
In fact, identity is too profound a topic to be transformed into a simple pretext for slogans, however justified they may be. It deserves a scrutiny of our history and the history of “others” in the realm of the national and international past and present. The much-dreamt-of “melting pot” of global, modern society is often confronted by an obsessive, nostalgic need for tribal togetherness, where communal memories and impulses gain a combative, sometimes vehement, nature. What we should never forget is that the “other” isn’t evil because he might be from another party or race or faith; evil is the “man in uniform”, among the others and among ourselves, the fierce believer in unanimity, homogeneity, uniformity and uniform obedience.
The most recent example of the unsolvable conflict between “politicians in uniform” in a free, democratic country was, unfortunately, the deplorable show in the American Congress about the late 2000s financial default.
It seems the right moment to remember how the American writer Gertrude Stein referred to the difference between identity and entity. She saw identity as connecting us to a certain social group. This means by gender, ethnicity, race, language, sexual orientation — as well as perhaps by some specific physical or psychological features, trivial preferences, etc. In a more frivolous way, the social group with whom we identify can even be the fat and / or myopic people, baseball lovers, handicapped people, stamp collectors, followers of a certain diet, etc.
By contrast, entity is what is left when we are alone. Even in such a solitary situation the connection to other people isn’t totally annulled, of course; it only becomes implicit rather than explicit.
In any case, with both identity and entity, the particular premise or the main imprint of our biography (family, religion, persecution, victimhood, professional distinction, etc.) plays an important role. For we are not only the product of a family, religion, country, community, school, profession, etc. Are we not, in the end, the result of our readings, the product of our bibliography as well as our biography? I don’t necessarily mean political-ideological books such as the Little Red Book of Mao or the green one by Gaddafi or Bin Laden’s terrorist commandments or even Hitler’s Mein Kampf—although they undeniably have their readers and even followers. Rather I have in mind books rightly considered the canon of our Western culture, from the Bible to Aristotle, from Cervantes to Darwin, from Einstein to Shakespeare, from Spinoza to Whitman. It’s an artificial but important genealogy that competes as well as cooperates with the natural one in structuring our personality, in shaping our options, our beliefs and projects. It expresses our need for something beyond our too-human limitations, our family, religion, territorial, linguistical narrowness, something that exposes us to the vast uncertainties and togetherness of the world.
It’s odd to speak about such “esoteric” questions in a time of increased mass-media dominance, and instant communication through Facebook, mobile phones, Twitter, etc., with its cheap oversimplifications, replacement of readers with TV fans, of the word with the image, of increasing illiteracy and lowering of standards of education among young people. But just because of such an acute and worsening situation it may be worth reminding people that the consequences of a too “pragmatic”, simplified, and speedy approach to life may have significant consequences in the choices people make for their own lives and for the lives of their communities, what principles they respect, what kind of representatives they select, what type of coexistence they wish to have with their close neighbours and with far-away neighbours on our endangered planet.
Books and art and culture provide a necessary and instructive break from our daily rush, from the tyranny of excessively trivial details in the daily odyssey we embody. Books often play a second, intimate yet essential role in our being. Our “bookish genealogy” might sometimes be even more important than the one found in the archives of heredity. In the adventure through the printed page we may find relatives who are closer and who go even further back than those in the family lineage, however extensive it may be. The appealing companions we discover in the library shelves in fact form another kind of world population. As interlocutors, models, advisors, friends, challengers, these fictitious individuals tell us about the mind and soul of the planet’s real population, things that are more important than the daily news and scandals. They are for some of us the real formative and trustworthy comrades with whom we share the hopes and disappointments of our spiritual selves, of our “thinking” biography, with its solitude and inner landscapes and intensity.
Phylon of Alexandria dared to say that the Word (Logos) was the very first image of Divinity, the first representation of God, that the intellect conveys, in fact, His and man’s real image. He argued that the spiritual connection is the real human factor of cohesion, not the genetic or ritualistic one. The intellectual nature of Logos means, Phylon said, the spiritual affinity amongst us, and it represents “the image of the divine.”