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The fictions of Claudio Magris, particularly the novels, all display a common interest in the recuperation of lost historical detail and in the redemptive mobilization of the past. Magris, who calls himself a "maniaco della precisione" ("Alla cieca: Delirio" 16), routinely scours public and private archives in Europe to verify the authenticity of the details in his historical accounts and to pay respect to "humanity's reality and man's work" (16). However, Magris suspends his tendency toward precision when writing about one theme in particular: tech- nology. In a personal communication from October 2009, Claudio Magris writes:
[ . . . ] io sono da un lato estremamente ignorante, maldestro e incapace rispetto al mondo informatico, ma ne sono profondamente affascinato (positivamente e negativamente) dall'aspetto culturale ed espressivo. Proprio per queste ragioni, non ho scritto quasi mai articoli che parlino di queste tecnologie, perché per scrivere un articolo bisogna avere una competenza, mentre in un romanzo si può partire, come io ho cercato di fare, dalla tecnologia, per sbizzarrirsi in fantasie grottesche.1
In his opinion, mastery, or at least a reasonable understanding, of the technologies about which one writes journalistically is necessary in order to establish authority on the subject. Fiction, on the other hand, allows for the opportunity to experiment with the potential of a given technology, and here Magris is particularly interested in the cultural and expressive potential of technology. One perceives a trace of technophobia in his words, a kind of sacred respect for the cult of the technocratic expert. As Wittgenstein put it at the end of his Tracta- tus Logico-Philosophicus, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Magris acknowledges his own technological ignorance and concedes that, at least in non-fiction writing, he cannot write respon- sibly about this topic. However, fiction provides the ideal hypothetical space in which a thinker may, even with little practical knowledge about a given subject, try out the possibilities of the phenomenon.
While technology is virtually absent from Magris's critical and jour- nalistic writing (for the Corriere della sera, for example), it pervades his most recent novel Alla cieca (2005), a text that dissolves time and multiplies the human body through technology.2 Alla cieca is what one might call a hypothetical novel, verging on...