James Duesterberg

Subjectivity, Perspective and Fascism in “Mario and the Magician”

 

 

“…at his beguiling words, what was come of our Mario? It is hard for me to tell, hard as it was for me to see; for here was nothing less than an utter abandonment of the inmost soul, a public exposure of timid and deluded passion and rapture…He could not, it was plain, trust his eyes and ears for joy, and the one thing he forgot was precisely that he could not trust them.”

p. 177

 

What kind of story, exactly, is “Mario and the Magician”? It promises, in the beginning, a socially aware travelogue of an austere family at an Italian resort. Yet we cannot discern, exactly, who the family is; though the narrator is clearly very class-conscious, his own family seems to be both snobbish and the victim of snobbery. The family leaves for a magic show, and we anticipate the titular characters’ appearance; yet Mario, referenced early on in the story but seemingly insignificant, doesn’t show up in force until the last five pages, and his absence in the narrative is quite conspicuous.

 

As a whole, the story is a sort of formal mirror to the “uncanniness” that seems to be the defining motif of the characters’ experience at the show and on their trip as a whole. The magician is “the personification” of the “uncanniness and all the strained feelings which had oppressed the atmosphere of our holiday” (p. 165). Just as the narrator seems to have trouble getting a handle on the magician and his experience as a whole, the story – and specifically the perspective created by the first-person narrator – creates an “uncanny” effect for the reader. Who is this narrator? There is a conspicuous lack of time spent on the family, and we never feel as if we have a sense of who they are. The narrator seems to vacillate between travel-diary mode, removed anthropological description, and a highly (unacknowledged) subjective exploration of his consciousness. Though the story starts with a personal reaction (“The atmosphere of Torre di Venere remains unpleasant in the memory…From the first moment the air of the place made us uneasy,” etc [p. 133],), it moves quickly to travel-guide mode (“Torre di Venere lies some fifteen kilometers from Portoclemente, one of the most popular summer resorts on the Tyrrhenian Sea,” etc [ibid]). On the next page, it switches back to the narrator’s subjective experience; the following few pages reveal the narrator’s almost entomological fascination with class. He describes the “middle-class mob,” whose “average[ness]” “vexes [his] sensitive” – e.g., aristocratic – “soul” (p. 139). Yet his family is itself forced to leave the hotel they are staying at because a high-class lady is seemingly “vexed” by his child’s illness (p. 135-6), just as he is sickened by the “repulsive youngster” with “disgusting raw sores” from a sunburn (p. 139).

 

How do we navigate the evident gap between his class pretensions and his apparent petit-bourgeois status? This divergence between what he reveals to us in his narrative asides and what we see happen to him emphasizes one of the central issues of the story: interiority and narrative reliability. For even when we see him humiliated by the aristocratic woman, it is through his perspective, the same narrative perspective that looks down on the middle-class Italians.

 

Importantly, one of the most conspicuous instances of the problematic relationship between the reader and the narrator occurs as the narrator and his family arrive at the magic show. As they wait for the show to begin, we get the nervous voice of the narrator: “It had got to a quarter past nine, it got to almost half past. It was natural that we should be nervous. When would the children get to bed? It had been a mistake to bring them…” (p. 146). The use of free-indirect discourse here ambiguates the interpretive process of the audience and puts us in the tenuous position of deciding when the judgments and emotions implied by the text were made by the narrator. This brings us to the dramatic and thematic apex of the story: the magic show.

 

During the show, the magician, Cipollo, methodically breaks down the audience members’ confidence in their agency and subjectivity. By hypnotizing them he gains control of their will, and thus destroys the self-confident, ordered, individualistic framework of their lives.  It is “one long series of attack upon the willpower, the loss of compulsion of volition” (p. 166). The narrator looks on with horror: he sees a sort of fascist spectacle, with the hypnotized, de-individuated audience cheering on their mental subjugation as if at “a patriotic demonstration” (p. 164). Throughout, indeed, we see frequent references to nationality and national identity and “pride”; we frequently encounter behavior that is (at least in the eyes of the narrator) colored by national allegiance. The surprising, and scary, thing for the narrator, however, is that for the audience members, this “military somnambulism” is something of an escape: one hypnotized audience member “seemed quite content in his abject state, quite pleased to be relieved of the burden of voluntary choice” (p. 170). Here is, clearly, a scathing indictment of fascism: the abnegation of consciousness, rationality and self-control, leads people into a semi-Dionysian rapture in which they are controlled by an evil manipulator.

 

However, “Mario and the Magician” is not only a critique of fascism.  The encounter with the magician is bookended by two instances of conspicuously dubious narrative perspective. The scene when they arrive and the narrator begins to question their reasons for coming, by the end of the story, has turned into a frank admission that he, too, is unable to break the spell that the magician has over them: “that we had not taken [the children] away can only be explained by saying that we had caught the general devil-may-careness of the hour. By that time it was all one” (p. 172). Why can’t he tear himself away? This “uncanny” attraction – the reason that they had stayed in the town at all, apparently – is a telling allegory for our own relation to the story, to narrative itself, and ultimately to our own subjectivity.

 

Questions for discussion:

 

·        Is Mario the hero of the story?

·        How are we to evaluate the narrator, morally?

·        What is this story saying about fascism? How does the form of the story mirror, and question, it’s content in terms of a condemnation of fascism?

·        What is the relation between class and politics in this story?