The hybrids of Claudio Magris

This essay argues that Claudio Magris’s early novels, Inferences from a Sabre (1991), and A Different Sea (1993), deliberately mingle genres in order to disrupt systems of knowing, and the power they enforce. While both novels treat different subject matter, they have a shared concern with the application of texts to life, deploying a range of genres – biography and autobiography, letters, the novel, the philosophical and scholarly essay and historiography – in bringing their stories to the reader. The ruptures between these genres disclose Magris’s interest in structures of knowing, the work of genre in enforcing a certain world view, and the importance of the capacity – derived from his interest in the ‘Habsburger Mythos’ – to accommodate intra-generic variance, multiplicity, even contradiction, instantiating an unsettled writing, somewhere on the border between certainty and doubt. Magris’s work with genre is thus not only aesthetic, but political, recalling a lost vision of European organization and inter-working