Zobaczyć ranę – uwagi o geopoetyce unaocznienia (na przykładzie Postępowania umorzonego Claudio Magrisa)

Abstract

The article analyzes Claudio Magris’s novel Blameless, which confronts its anonymous protagonist (and also its reader) with the emptiness of the whitewashed walls of Risiera, Trieste crematorium. This whiteness becomes a “symptom” (Didi Huberman), i.e. a whitened trace of, as the narrator puts it, “the real collective trauma of the city”. Magris’s novel confronts the reader with this whiteness – a “symptom” that points to the “Trieste wound”, in this way, demonstarting the temporal thickness of place. According to Magris, tourist brochures still cover the surface of the world like sticking plasters on wounds – this metaphor summarizes the way in which literature can unveil the traumatic past of a place.