His senses were satisfied and his conscience at rest - Svevo stares into the void

Why this turn by so many outstanding writers, and eventually readers, to such unpleasant characters?  What motivates Italo Svevo (or Machado de Assis or Luigi Pirandello) to wallow in the blinkered selfishness  of a protagonist, Emilio, who provides the narrative motion and ethical meaning of the novel by his complete failure to understand himself, where the irony of the novel is that he is always wrong?

I have many conventional ideas on this subject, and will mention some of them before wallowing a bit myself.  First, this is not the social realism of, say, Verga or Zola, who are going to show the world the way it really is, with all of the dirt and the grit.  Not that Svevo was not reading Verga and Zola with interest.  Nor is this the distant aestheticism of Flaubert, in which the empty amorality of the characters are in the service of the creation of an object of extraordinary beauty, perhaps.  Not that Svevo had not absorbed Flaubert.

No, here we see an example of a novel written against or across or within a background of the contemporary philosophy and science of 1898.  Nietzsche, Darwin, and perhaps some precursors of Freud, or the actual Freud, just maybe.  As a psychologist, Svevo is a peer of Freud.  He is studying men, mostly himself, I suppose, who have lost not just their faith in the wake of these big modern ideas, but also their religion, their church.  Society no longer even requests that they fake their faith.  In the absence of God, what values does man substitute?  Svevo has little interest in the religious aspect of this question, but he is interested in the void.

The protagonist of As a Man Grows Older does not do so well in the face of the void – he has even written a novel, for pity’s sake – but other characters do all right.  There are sympathetic characters in the novel, but Svevo makes me work for my sympathy.  Emilio keeps blocking my view.

In the course of his life he had dreamed of theft, murder, and rape.  He had experienced imaginatively the criminal’s courage, strength and perverse desires, he had even dreamed the results of his crime, above all that he should invariably escape punishment.  But then he had had the double satisfaction of indulging in his dream and of discovering all the things he had wanted to destroy still intact, so that his senses were satisfied and his conscience at rest.  He had committed a crime without any harmful results.  (37)

For example.  Or even better, one about Emilio’s best friend, a sculptor:

Emilio met him next morning walking behind the cart which took dogs away to be killed, and quite overcome by pity for the poor beasts.  He was no doubt genuinely affected, but he admitted that he indulged in the emotion because it increased his artistic sensibility.  (133)

Italian literature must be the most comically grim literary tradition of the 19th century.  This is the second most important thing I have learned about Italian literature this year.  I wrote down some more good ones, but probably not as good as the above, and while reading the most ironic aphorism-packed chapters (5 through 7), I did not take any notes at all.  So these will do.

Adopting an ironic tone which it often amused him to assume towards himself… - Italo Svevo's As a Man Grows Older

The book at hand is When a Man Grows Older (not a great title) aka Emilio’s Carnival (terrible title) aka Senilità (actual Italian title), by Aron Ettore Schmitz aka Italo Svevo, published in 1898.  It’s Svevo’s second novel.  I haven’t read the first, A Life (1892).  Svevo was so disgusted by the failures of these two novels that his third did not appear for twenty-five years, and even then it took the encouragement of James Joyce, who had been Svevo’s English tutor in Trieste, which is an unlikely story but I guess true.

When a Man Grows Older is not as good as The Confessions of Zeno / Zeno’s Conscience (1923) – why Svevo’s titles cause so much trouble I do not understand – or at least not as good as the later novel’s amazing first chapter, the “last cigarette” chapter.

The reason Senilità did not sell is that it was a hideously ugly book, judging by the photo at Wikipedia.  The other reason is that the interior of the book is also quite ugly in a way that modern literature has trained us to endure but was apparently not so easily digested in 1898.  Now we – some of us – are used to it.

Emilio, who per the title is a man and who is growing older in the sense that we all are – he is thirty-five when the novel begins – picks up a young woman, Angiolina, on the street, a new adventure for him but not so much for her.  Eventually their love affair is destroyed by Emilio’s jealousy and disgust at Angiolina’s lies about her sexual behavior.  Sometimes it is all quite a lot like the “Swann in Love” part of Swann’s Way.  But Emilio is a much smaller man than Swann.

The novel’s subplots are about depression, betrayal, and death.  Angiolina in some sense represents a life lived rather than delayed, impeded or destroyed. 

Her figure even became a symbol…

That lofty, splendid symbol sometimes seemed on the point of coming to life again as a warm-blooded woman, but always stayed a sad and thoughtful one.  (235)

These corrosively ironic lines are practically the last of the novel.  From the point of view of Emilio, which occupies most of the book, Angiolina has always been more of a symbol than a person.  The ingenuity of the novel is that it lets me see Angiolina’s warm-bloodedness through the distorted perspective of Emilio.   Angiolina has always been alive; Emilio in some more abstract state.  “[I]n his emotion he had gone in search of images and metaphor” (218).  The novel is a masterpiece of subtle and less subtle ironies.

Quotations and page numbers from the NYRB Classics edition, translated by Beryl de Zoete.  The title quotation, which describes the novel perfectly, is on p. 18.

Now every heart is glad, and far and wide / Rises once more the rumour / of work as it once did - when Italian literature acquired an Italy

I have switched to the J. G. Nichols translation of Leopardi.  The title is from Canto XXIV, “The Calm after the Storm.”  I have finally gotten to the point where there is a united Italy.  And Italian literature expands.

Giovanni Verga – I want to revisit and read more of his stories of hard times in Sicily, like those in Little Novels of Sicily (1883), and I also want to try at least one of his novels, either The House by the Medlar Tree (1881) or Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889) or both.

Luigi Pirandello was also from Sicily.  The major plays for which he is best known are from the 1920s and 1930s, too late for me – as  usual I want to choke off my reading somewhere around World War I – but The Late Mattia Pascal, a novel, is early, from 1904.  Somebody will have to tell me what else is especially good.  I like the sound of Shoot: The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator (1915).  Pirandello is the first Nobelist I will mention in this post.

Grazia Deledda (she’s the second) is Sardinian.  I would likely enjoy her novels just for their unusual setting, but I assume they have more to offer than that.  After the Divorce (1902) and Elias Portulu (1903) are in my local library, which is encouraging.  Deledda is another reason my attention had turned to Italy.

Matilde Serao is associated with Rome and Naples – I’m back on the boot – where she was a journalist and novelist.  The fairly recent short story collection Unmarried Women looks most promising to me, but there are a large number of novels in English published a hundred years ago.  Ford Madox Ford, whose taste is eccentric but who seems to have read everything, recommends Conquest of Rome, Desire of Life, and In the Country of Jesus (see The March of Literature. p. 859).  Unlikely, but life is full of surprises.

I think of Italo Svevo as a 20th century writer because of Zeno’s Conscience (1923), but his first two novels, A Life (1892) and As a Man Grows Older (1898), are much earlier.  I have read the latter but remember nothing more than that I thought it was pretty good.  I would appreciate advice on the former.  Svevo at this point was not actually in Italy, since Trieste was part of Austria.  Another marginal region raising its voice.

Back to Tuscany, the old center of Italy, to remind anyone interested of the Pinocchio (1883) readalong at Simpler Pastimes scheduled for later this month.  Just 200 pages, including illustrations, written for tiny little children.  So easy to join in.

The poets are more of a problem.  20th century Italian poetry strikes me as very strong – Italian fiction, too – but the period before the war is either weaker or poorly represented in English.

The great figure is Giosuè Carducci (Nobel #3), but even in Italian he seems to have lost some of his status, as if squeezed between the great 20th century poets and Leopardi.  The 1994 Selected Poems shows off Carducci well.  It includes his long ode Hymn to Satan (1865), which is not what the title suggests.  One of Carducci’s major collections, The Barbarian Odes (1877-89), is also available in English, but it is one of the worst translations I have ever come across.

A number of poets began publishing during or just after the war.  I hope to read Dino Campana, who wrote just one wild visionary book, Orphic Songs (1914), then, sadly, spent the rest of his life in mental hospitals.  I have my eye on Umberto Saba, too.  Move the cutoff just a bit later and lots of interesting writers pop up.

Look how efficient I was today.  Tomorrow I will end with the hard cases.  If you have advice on Gabrielle D’Annunzio or Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, let’s save it for a day – I do want it.  Then I will browse through some books I won’t read and take a glance at the 20th century.

Five days for all of this.  In my defense, it is an exciting literature.  Even in the 19th century, exciting.

The necessary but onerous duty of summary

The phrase is pilfered, more or less, from 10 Rules for Criticism by D. G. Myers.  Please note that Prof. Myers does not specify what needs to be summarized, and also note Rule 10, which suggests something about the spirit of the list.

James Wood, in How Fiction Works (2008), includes chapters titled “Detail,” “Language,” “Character,” and so on, but none called, or at all about, “Plot” or “Story.”  Wood is, though, an eminently professional critic – he dutifully summarizes.  What does he summarize?  How does he do it?  Here he is introducing Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings:

Mr. and Mrs. Mallard are trying out the Boston Public Garden for their new home, when a swan boat ([clarification on what a swan boat is]) passes them.  Mr. Mallard has never seen anything like this before. (How Fiction Works, 12)

A quotation from the McCloskey's book follows.  This strikes me as something close to ideal.  What the book is about in one clause, followed by an illustrative incident.  Wood follows the identical pattern on the next page, this time with What Maisie Knew by Henry James.  Wood claims to be a gleeful revealer of plot secrets, but he is fibbing.  He in fact reveals only what he plans to use, like any parsimonious writer.  It might well still be too much for a reader far over on the experience side of the continuum, but his touch is delicate.

I find it hard to understand how Wood’s plain plot summary is any more intrusive than something like this, another type of necessary summary:

The nameless narrator of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger is highly unreliable, and finally unknowable (it helps that he is insane)…  Italo Svevo’s Zeno Cosini may be the best example of truly unreliable narration.  He imagines that by telling us his life story he is psychoanalyzing himself (he has promised his analyst to do this).  But his self-comprehension, waved confidently before our eyes, is as comically perforated as a bullet-holed flag. (How Fiction Works, 6)

Wood has now given us specific instructions on how to read these two novels.  Good instructions, yes, but aimed directly at the core experience of reading the books.  The thrill of discovery in these novels lies exactly in figuring out what these lunatics are doing, why and how they’re telling us their stories.  The plots, the incidents, just give the narrators something to do.  The narrators could do a range of other things with similar results, although the first chapter of The Confessions of Zeno, the “last cigarette” chapter, is irreplaceable.  Hunger is particularly pure – it has a “theme and variations” plot, a repetition of a specific kind of rise and fall in tension.  I seem to have summarized it in three sentences in this antique post, which, oddly, also has movie recommendations, darn good ones.

Hunger and The Confessions of Zeno are Modernist novels, working on principles that directly question earlier methods of fiction.  Pre-Modernist novels also question earlier methods of fiction, often in similar ways, but let's just stay on the standard path here.  I read on Modernist principles (other principles, too), regardless of what I am reading, so I feel comfortable with these novels.  I have been trained by them (experience), and by critics like Wood (knowledge). 

The service Wood is providing as a critic is to provide a point of entry into these books for readers not used to their peculiarities.  Wood is not suppressing discovery, but allowing it, encouraging exploration.  Or so I hope.  In those last two sentences, please replace “Wood” with “I,” “is” with “am.”