Boris Pahor’s Urban Miniature: Conducting the City as an Open-Ended Score

Try See, Try Say

Boris Pahor (1913–2022) was both a major writer from Trieste and a member of Italy’s Slovene minority (Pahor and Rojc 2013). Until its 1920 annexation by the Kingdom of Italy under the Treaty of Rapallo, Pahor’s birthplace of Trieste had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s main seaport, but when Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922 his Fascists began the forced Italianization of the Slovene minority. In 1938, Pahor made contact with Slovenes working underground in Trieste, notably those of the militant organization TIGR, an acronym for Trst (Trieste) – Istra – Gorica – R(ij)eka. Beginning in 1927 and active until 1941, theirs was the first antifascist resistance movement in Europe.^[1] When in October 1943 Trieste became part of the Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland (OZAK) province administered by the Nazis, Pahor joined the Slovene partisans. Arrested by the Gestapo on 21 January 1944, he was first detained at the Coroneo prison in Trieste and then on 26 February deported to the first of a number of concentration camps, among them Natzweiler-Struthof in German-occupied Alsace, Dachau and Harzungen; until he ended up in Bergen-Belsen in Germany. Liberated on 15 April 1945, he went to a French sanatorium to recover, before returning to Trieste at the end of 1946.

Pahor’s novels take as their major themes the experiences of Trieste’s Slovenes and integrate autobiographical elements, best illustrated by his novel Parnik trobi nji (The Steamboat Blows to Her [1964]). Among his major works, Nekropola (1967; twice translated into English, under the titles “Pilgrim Among the Shadows” and “Necropolis” and the work that brought him the first of a number of Nobel Prize nominations) refers to his deportation. The Triestine trilogy Spopad s pomladjo (Difficult Spring) (1978), Zatemnitev (Dark Days) (1975) and V labirintu (In the Labyrinth) (1984) together trace the history of the city and its inhabitants.

In this tribute to an unquestionably great writer, I shall focus on an urban miniature Pahor published, in French, as one of a selection of stories published as Arrêt sur le Ponte Vecchio (Stop on the Ponte Vecchio; Pahor (1999) 2023). Inspired notably by the musician, composer and urbanist Christopher Dell, my analysis of “L’alphabet muet de la nuit” (The silent alphabet of the night) explores Trieste’s urban space as an open-ended score (Dell 2016a). As I show, combining poetry, music, film, and architecture opens a route to approach a new kind of investigation of the urban space.

Following Walter Benjamin, I believe that the most exact knowledge of a city is obtained from visual representations of it and its architectural plan—put simply, its layout and street map. Writing about Paris, Benjamin observed that “There is an ultra-violet and an infra-red knowledge of this city, neither of which can be reduced to the form of the book: it is the photography and the plan—the most exact knowledge of the singular and the general” (Benjamin (1929) 2015, 134). However, I would add a third layer to those two: language. A city’s multi-layered language matters as much as the structure of its urban space and its appearance, which in turn implies the necessity of scrutinising the urban space from diverse standpoints, which should all be combined to “try say” the city. Pahor’s short story does exactly that.

“Try say” and not “try to say”…; on this formation of words, Georges Didi-Huberman commented:

Try to say is to put a name on coming up short, to state the very possibility of failure; try say instead underlines the effectiveness of the desire, of the attempt, the fertile nature of the very conflict in which any demand to say struggles. […] Saying is basically just trying, trying out an experience which is inseparable from its risk and its realisation.” (Didi-Huberman 2014, 55)

As a matter of interest, for this essay in tribute to Pahor I have derived a good deal of inspiration from Samuel Beckett in his famous Worstward Ho (Beckett 1983). Indeed, I see Pahor’s urban miniature as his own attempt to “try see” and “try say” the city, its urban space, for which he used “a language of perpetual trying-to-say, a language of approximation always suspended between the sensitive and the intelligible, a language experimenting on itself the disorder inherent in the experiences of the gaze” (Didi-Huberman 2014, 70).

The Karst, the Sea, the City

Half-way between Duino Castle, made famous by Rainer Maria Rilke’s Elegies, and the Habsburg splendour of Castle Miramare lies the beach of Canovella degli Zoppoli offering breathtaking views of the Gulf of Trieste and of the Karst, with Trieste itself in the background (Figure 1). The view encompasses the literary space Boris Pahor occupied, for he never ceased to shuttle between the mountains and the sea: “When I am in the mountains, I want to go back to the seaside. And as soon as I am in front of the sea, I want to put my climbing boots on” (cited in de Fontaine 2019, 80, my own translation). Like his own biography, Pahor’s writing is intimately connected to space: he was indissolubly bound to the Karst, the sea and the nearby city.^[2]

Figure 1:

The Gulf of Trieste, and Trieste in the background, viewed from Canovella. Courtesy: © Anja Čop.

First, the omnipresent Karst—a limestone plateau overlooking the Gulf of Trieste and connecting southwestern Slovenia and northeastern Italy. The dividing line there between the rural and the urban mirrors the political rift between Slovenia and Italy, Trieste having been, for the Slovenes, a space to assert themselves. In Pahor’s words: “From the Karst towards the city there flows always a new sap, keeping the city alive, its blood forever young and new; blood ready to mix, to deny itself. But something draws you there! As if you wanted to put your own powers to the test and succeed where others have failed” (Pahor 1964, 154, my translation).

Next, the sea. Trieste—city of winds—was formally absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy in 1921 and, to the oppressed Slovenes, the sea was their only freedom-facing space. For them, Trieste was “a cage open to the sea on one side” (Pahor 1964, 108, my own translation). Thus, the sea amounted to a highly connoted space, representing not only a refuge for all antifascist resistance fighters and most notably to the TIGR, but almost the only place where Slovenes could express themselves freely, using the mother tongue they were forbidden to speak everywhere else in the city and surrounding region. Certainly, that was a main motif in Boris Pahor’s poetry as well as a source of his longstanding and unfailing commitment to antifascism and the Slovene cause.

Finally, the city. The famous scholar and writer Claudio Magris recalls about his hometown that “Trieste was also—was, thank God—an example of how the border can become—can be—a barrier, a wall; a wall of hatred; a wall of ignorance, of rejection of the other: reciprocal hatred and mistrust between Italians and Slovenes, provoking violence, grudges, revenge” (Magris 2007, 11, my translation). On 13 July 1920, the young Boris Pahor witnessed the arson attack by Italian Fascists on the Narodni dom, the Slovene cultural house in the centre of Trieste: “Due to the trauma of the experience of the Slovene Norodni Dom being burned down, which I experienced at age seven, on the spot, and following the shock that I could not go to Slovene schools anymore, I felt robbed in a way of the spiritual and psychological meaning of life.”^[3]

That childhood trauma became a topos, for it had left an indelible mark like that of a hot iron, that branded everything Pahor wrote. Ironically, it was in a building a stone’s throw from the Narodni dom, Oberdan Square, that in February 1944 Pahor found himself face to face with the muscular interrogation methods of the Nazi secret police, which became the starting point for an odyssey that included Dachau, Natzweiler-Struthof, Dachau again; then Dora, Harzungen, and finally Bergen-Belsen.

It must have been more than simple coincidence that on the very day he regained his freedom in Lille, France, on 1 May 1945, Trieste was liberated by the Yugoslav army, to be soon placed under international administration, until 1954, as the Free Territory of Trieste (FTT) (Figure 2). In the sort of political compromise typical of the immediate postwar period, the Free Territory of Trieste was formally independent of both Italy and Yugoslavia, its integrity and independence guaranteed by the Security Council of the United Nations.^[4] Trieste notably re-established itself as a free port, free of customs charges, much as it had been for the two hundred years from 1719 until 1918. No longer run from the Habsburg capital of Vienna, the port was now overseen by an International Commission that included Yugoslavia, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Switzerland, Austria and Hungary. Trieste had its own flag, currency, and stamps; and it was intended that it should become a unitary, democratic, and independent state. The city’s new status notably implied parity between the Slovene and Italian languages, a controversial and often neglected matter despite the Italo–Yugoslav Treaty of Osimo (1975), which attributed Zone A, that is the city and port of Trieste, to Italy; and Zone B, that is the northern parts of Istria, to Yugoslavia (today Slovenia and Croatia). Indeed, the United Nations Security Council is still the de jure guarantor of the integrity of the Free Territory of Trieste:

The Free Territory of Trieste was established in 1947 through United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 16 and a Treaty of Peace with Italy and the victorious powers. However, over 70-years on, the final arrangements agreed at the time have not been fully implemented. Conceived as a territory controlled by the UNSC, with its own Government and Statute, Trieste had a temporary Allied Military Government followed by a civilian administration (Italy and Yugoslavia), whilst awaiting the appointment of a Governor. However, the Security Council’s provisions were never implemented, which means an uncertainty regarding Trieste’s current status. (Coloni and Clegg 2022, 179)

Figure 2:

1950 Marshall Plan poster, with the FTT flag erroneously featured with a blue background instead of red. Source: I. Spreekmeester, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marshall_Plan_poster.JPG.

Even today therefore, one might reasonably propose a referendum on the prospect of appointing a provisional governor:

On balance, it seems that the status quo will continue. The existing de facto situation is well established and recognised, at least tacitly, by the international community. Italy, Croatia and Slovenia have significant interests in maintaining their administrating roles, and so far at least, there is not a critical mass of the Trieste population calling for change.” (Coloni and Clegg 2022, 192)

For Pahor, that conditional tone was a sign of hope:

With the establishment of the Free Territory of Trieste, for the first time in history the coexistence of the two national communities would bring with it a future. Little by little, friction would diminish, and instead of a struggle against a hegemonic tendency to demand assimilation, consciousness would be fostered of a shared past. The time would come for the two civilizations and their cultures to complement each other, accompanied by economic development which wide openness to the hinterland would facilitate and which would itself be the prelude to a general development of the territory. The Territory’s destiny was to become in short order a kind of Switzerland-on-the-Adriatic (Pahor 1984, 34, my translation).

That excerpt illustrates Pahor’s typical reflexivity which, in passing, does not shy away from stating a truth structuring the whole history of Trieste: namely that the city had been created for its hinterland and had been exhausted without it; that hinterland being both the essentially Slovene Karst and Vienna. When Pahor himself was born there in 1913, Trieste was Austro-Hungary’s major port city (Borsetti 2016).

It would be wrong to attribute Pahor’s point of view to a Slovene bias—far from it, in fact—and for my purposes it is enough to mention here the brilliant analysis by the Trieste journalist Angelo Vivante (1869–1915) who in a major work published in 1912 criticized Italian irredentism. Vivante denounced both “national awakening” and centralism, and clearly indicated that the key to Trieste was to be found not in Rome but in Trieste’s own hinterland (Vivante (1912) 1917, 212). As a border town par excellence, Trieste’s destiny has always been to stand as an autonomous and free city, its equally free port integrated into a Europe composed of regions (Selva and Umek 2013).

Trieste—Ithaca to a local Ulysses… Boris Pahor began by studying theology at the seminary in the coastal town of Capodistria (Slov. Koper), then at that of Gorizia (Slov. Gorica). In 1938 he abandoned that path to return to Trieste. He joined the Italian army in 1940 and served in Libya, where he took his matura exams, discovered the Arab-Muslim world and read the Koran, before returning to Trieste in February 1941. He was then posted to the shores of Lake Garda, but after Italy’s capitulation to the Allies and the armistice of 8 September 1943 Pahor went back again to Trieste, now under German military occupation. After hellish times in various concentration camps and eventual release, there followed a stay in a sanatorium near Paris, until in 1946 he returned to Trieste with “the feeling of rediscovering Ithaca after countless adventures” (Pahor 1984, 39, my translation).

Exile is an individual destiny, but it is typical of all Trieste’s literature, as exemplified by the Istrian writer Fulvio Tomizza who moved to Trieste following the 1954 transfer of Zone B to Yugoslavia (Tomizza 1969, 1974; Locatelli 2021). However, beyond his return to his own place, Pahor tells the story of another journey, one of self-knowledge and of his discovering his own consciousness; a search for the miraculous, but also a portrait of a wounded child, which opened Pahor to the essence of things and to awareness that required him to engage in active resistance. Pahor’s novels—always tinged with autobiography—often depict Slovenes as ready to take to the woods like the French and Belgian maquisards, to defend their language and their homeland.

The Silent Alphabet of the Night

Among Pahor’s short stories, “L’alphabet muet de la nuit”—first published as “Nema abeceda noči” in Na sipini (On the Sandbank; Pahor 1960)—offers a highly creative and thought-provoking urban miniature (Huyssen 2015). The story refers to the famous French film Le Quai des brumes, known in English as Port of Shadows. The film was made in 1938, directed by Marcel Carné, and featured Jean Gabin, Michel Simon and Michèle Morgan. The screenplay was by Jacques Prévert based on a novel by Pierre Marc Orlan (1927). The story begins on a foggy night in the port city of Le Havre where, in the “Panama” bar, the hero Jean, an army deserter played by Jean Gabin, meets the young Nelly (Michèle Morgan). For the sake of Nelly’s safety, Jean kills Nelly’s godfather, Zabel; but as Jean flees to join the boat to Venezuela he is murdered by gangster Lucien, a young local man whose hatred Jean has aroused. Port of Shadows is a definitively noir film belonging to the new realist, poetic, and modern cinema (Figure 3).

Figure 3:

Port of Shadows – DVD cover of the 2012 restored version.

Emerging from the cinema where Port of Shadows has just been screened, the narrator of “L’alphabet muet de la nuit” proceeds quite literally to perform the film, as well as the “phrasing” of the city. Rewinding and rolling out the screen images, decoding and re-encoding the city, the story’s narrator—a young composer—captures the multilayered urban experience, delivering a production of the city both as private and public space. Strolling through Trieste at night still caught in the web of what he has seen in Port of Shadows, the composer saves Michèle Morgan, the film’s central female actress, offering her “this solitary pier under the silver stars and the amphitheatre of the sleeping sea”. He then proceeds to compose a symphony of the sea, a symphonie marine,* a symphonie triestine.^[5] Any reader familiar with Trieste will recognize that Pahor was referring to the Molo Audace, the famous pier in front of the Piazza Unità d’Italia, Trieste’s main square, to which this bold wharf is a sort of extension, offering a captivating view over both the city and the sea. Alone again on the quayside—the film’s original French title is Le Quai des brumes (The dock of mists)—the narrator meets another woman, whose name we never learn, and then continues to compose the musical score of the city, his footsteps beating out the time. In Figure 4, the area in grey shows where the narrator walked.

Figure 4:

Trieste’s street map with the port area in grey. Courtesy: © Christophe Solioz.

The mechanism of walking, the interplay between steps taken and music, opens the way to a different perception of the city, one producing the urban space (de Certeau 1988, 91‐110): First the harbour station and the fish market (today an exhibition centre for modern and contemporary art, the Salone degli incanti), then the pier stretching far away into the sea, and finally the port with its fishermen unloading boxes of fish; and as background—the hinterland, the lights in the hills and the Karst, still asleep. Clarinets, violins, cymbals, and drums combine in the narrator’s symphony to record the rich mixture of the city’s sounds: the wind from the Karst, the fishermen’s nets thrown splashing into the bay, the sea’s whispered lullaby; and human sounds, the music of a party going on at the naval base, and the noise of a steam locomotive… all “found sounds”. To create music, to give birth to it, sounds need not be organized according to some preconceived scheme; rather it is enough to perceive them, for according to the well-known statement of composer John Cage, “every sound can be music”. Only the wheels of the Plough, up there in the sky, are silent: “There, in the sky, they are deaf, dejected and mute, hands drawing in the air. Inaudible circles of hands, silent rings of emptiness. The silent alphabet of the night” (Pahor (1999) 2023, my translation). The city is interpreted as a space organized as music structured by indeterminacy (Cage (1958) 1961), and the text ends up composing a musical piece as an event.

The urban space refers to the city no longer as a static object (Figure 4), but as a performance, including a personal appropriation of space. It was Christopher Dell—at once artist, musician and urbanist—who developed the concepts of performance and improvisation (Dell 2019), while the original term “performative urbanism” was introduced by the urban planner Sophie Wolfrum (2015). Pahor’s cinematographic text sets the city dancing: “Here you have your symphony, and Michèle, and the stars, and the silence, and the song of the sea” (Pahor 2023, 168). His urban miniature reminds us that “space” is produced while experiencing the city. As Wolfrum pinpoints:

The unique performative character of architecture emphasizes the components of spatial experience, perception, and behaviour, which are an essential part of architectural reality. Thus architecture disposes of a repertoire of specific architectural means and structures, which only become a reality during a cultural event, in a use situation, through movement, and being part of it while it is being perceived. (Wolfrum 2015, 15)

Within the planned city, another kind of city emerges, like the one Wassily Kandinsky dreamed of: “a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation” (Kandinsky (1911) 1989, 73).

To understand the city properly we must hear it, and Pahor transposed its poetic and musical structure into words. His short story relates to a new way of representing the city—viewing it as a “social laboratory” and “a ‘space of possibility’ in a constant state of flux” (Dell 2019, 16). Pahor wrote an open-ended score for the urban space, and his urban miniature suggests too how it is that the history of the city is as much the history of its improvisation. Indeed, “cities have always been involved with reassembling and resignifying arrangements that came about through improvisation” (Dell 2019, 8). Here improvisation matters, for the relationship between architectural thinking and musical thinking becomes relevant only from an improvisational perspective (Dell 2019, 176‐209). And that is precisely Pahor’s perspective.

To prevent misunderstanding, I should point out that the notion of the “score of the city” does not, as Pahor’s urban miniature perhaps tends to suggest, refer to a representation of the urban sound texture nor to an interpretation of the city in the sense of aestheticizing, or musical programming. Rather, musical thought encapsulates an analysis of the urban space precisely as an improvisational process: “The transposition of a musical concept to an architectural question on a metalevel” enables the interested observer “to elaborate on how urban processes can be rendered visible in a new form, by deploying a musical mode of spatial conception as a filter and perspective” (Dell 2019, 184). Music is therefore apprehended not as timbre, but as a way of organizing events.

Pahor’s “decomposition” and “recomposition”—the literal rewriting—of his city differs in many ways from the one practised notably by forward-looking and innovative masterworks of contemporary architecture, volumes such as Made in Tokyo (Kaijima, Kuroda and Tsukamoto 2001) and S, M, L, XL (Koolhaas and Mau 1995). Nevertheless, there are striking similarities worth highlighting, first among them the diagrammatic visualizations of the city. Pahor’s urban miniature depicts the city through hybrid mediality, that is, by combining film, imagined music, sounds, specific spaces, and something between film script and story outline. Indeed, Gaston Bachelard’s concept of “poetic diagram” (1964, 110) fits well with Dell’s understanding of diagrammatic ordering. In Pahor’s miniature too, what matters is the structure, not the form. Pahor’s narrative can be grasped alongside Jacques Derrida’s concept of “the writing of difference”: “Origin of the experience of space and time, this writing of difference, this fabric of the trace, permits the difference between space and time to be articulated, to appear as such, in the unity of an experience” (Derrida 1997, 65‐6). Such writing paves the way to experience the espace vécu, the lived space. In fact, it is only in such a writing process that “space reveals itself, or vice versa: every showing of space is writing” (Dell 2016b, 191). That is precisely how Port of Shadows works.

Second, Gilles Deleuze’s triple definition of writing applies perfectly to Pahor: “To write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map” (Deleuze 1988, 44). First, “the map has to do with performance” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12). By “map”, Deleuze meant “an abstract machine”—thus a diagram—that works by overcoming the paradox of blind seeing–making because instead of being depicted, the urban space is produced, creatively: “It is a machine that is almost blind and mute, even though it makes others see and speak” (Deleuze 1988, 34). As mentioned above, not only do we hear, but we “view” the city—as a performance.

Third, as in the case of “visualization” operating diagrammatically, Pahor’s text additionally calls on its readers—or, its “viewers”—to reconstruct meaning through their subjective and reflective contextualization of the constellation of the fragmentally distributed aspects (traces, structures) that are all waiting to be freely rearranged, to be recombined and reconfigured within new contexts. Accordingly, the urban miniature becomes for the reader a work in progress, including a burgeoning questioning—notably in the political sense. The de-territorialization enacted by Pahor, from the cinematic Le Havre of Port of Shadows to Trieste, invites each reader to proceed with an individual deterritorialization, thus everyone can actualize and improvise an individual musical score. The diagram is therefore an intersocial form that is always in the process of becoming, so that by combining the above-mentioned arguments the diagram offers the option of pursuing the city as an open process:

Lastly, every diagram is intersocial and constantly evolving. It never functions in order to represent a persisting world but produces a new kind of reality, a new model of truth. It is neither the subject of history, nor does it survey history. It makes history by unmaking preceding realities and meanings, constituting hundreds of points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions or improbable continuums. It doubles history with a sense of continual evolution. (Deleuze 1988, 35)

Conclusion

Pahor’s urban miniature blurs the boundaries between literary, musical, and architectural writing, making them converge, from a starting point of antagonism, to suggest that the urban space may be conceived as a performance, an open score—and embracing indeterminacy. Herein the notion of “score” need not necessarily refer to a musical composition so much as to an open structure and the conditions of its assemblage. The “recomposition” at work in Pahor’s text corresponds to his hope that one day his city would evolve and change, would acknowledge Italian Fascism alongside German Nazism and Slovene/Yugoslav communism, and in doing so give the Slovene minority the place they deserve.

On 13 July 2020, a century to the day after it had been burnt down by Fascist arsonists, Italy finally returned to Trieste’s Slovene community the building that had once housed the Narodni dom cultural centre. The handover was made in the presence of Italian president Sergio Mattarella and Slovene president Borut Pahor,^[6] and looking on was the by-then 107 year-old Boris Pahor himself. In fact the occasion was also the event of his decoration with the highest state orders of both Italy and Slovenia (Figure 5). It was to take two more long years for restitution to come into effect, in March 2022; a scant few weeks before Boris Pahor’s death on 30 May 2022.

Figure 5:

Trieste, 13 July 2020, the president of Italy Sergio Mattarella, the president of Slovenia Borut Pahor, and Boris Pahor. Courtesy: © Il Quirinale, 2020.