James Wood on Svevo

I will probably try to write in some detail about my own thoughts on Zeno's Conscience. For now I am trying to read what wise men have to say about it. Here's an essay by James Wood. Some excerpts from the essay I liked:

Svevo's temperament has affinities with Chekhov's: a gentle voyeurism which perhaps masked an intense sensitivity to human and animal suffering; an unwillingness to act or think like an 'intellectual', combined with an aversion to the high-flown, the poetic ('Why so many words for such few ideas?' Svevo said of poetry); a hostility to religion; and an eye for the subtly comic. [...]

Svevo's hostility to the perceived lack of ideas in poetry is significant, because he is one of the most thoroughly philosophical of modern novelists. He could recite many passages of Schopenhauer from memory. Clearly, the idea, central to Confessions of Zeno, of life as a sickness, is indebted to Schopenhauer (to whom Freud in turn admitted his debts); but Svevo, I suspect, was also enthralled by the jaunty paradoxical wit of Schopenhauer, who, for example, writes in The World as Will and Representation that walking is just a constantly prevented falling, just as the life of our body is a constantly prevented dying. Schopenhauer, who kept poodles, liked to say that he abused his dog with the epithet 'man' only when it was especially badly behaved; Svevo, who loved cats and dogs, wrote animal fables all his life. The gist of them was that animals can never fathom the mysterious wickedness of humans.

[...]

Living only in preparation for death: but not wanting to die. What is this but an essentially religious vision, without the consolation of religion? Again and again, Svevo returns us first of all to the pure death-diligence of the ancients (and Zeno's name alone should do that), and then to the great medieval and Renaissance philosophers and writers. His novel reverberates with a grave religious wit, not unlike that of Sir Thomas Browne, who wrote that 'the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying,' and very close to the 17th-century divine Jeremy Taylor, who tells us in Holy Living that balding is merely man's early preparation for death. Svevo would have loved that.

Coetzee on Svevo

I have copied an essay on Italo Svevo by J.M. Coetzee. Written in his usual nuts-and-bolts essay style but it is very informative and a very good introduction to his life and work.

I have finally finished reading Zeno's Conscience. It is really a great masterpiece, a complete laugh-riot and yet the final feeling one ends up with after closing the book is that of an overwhelming melancholia. Like his fellow Austrians (Trieste was then a part of the Austrian Empire) Robert Musil and Thomas Bernhard, Svevo is also dealing with the disease of consciousness. How thought and the habit of rationalising everything, which he says is the same as rational thinking when it comes to subjectivity, not only isolates individual consciousness from the outside world but also alienates one's thoughts and feelings from one's own self. (Thomas Bernhard goes one step further. With him it is madness and self-destruction.) This is the sickness of the soul -- one of the characters in the novel calls it the "imaginary sickness." Obviously it is something that cuts very close to the bone.

Anyway for now, in Coetzee's words:

"Like any good bourgeois of his time, Svevo fretted about his health: What constituted good health, how was it to be acquired, how maintained? In his writings health comes to take on a range of meanings, from the physical and psychic to the social and ethical. Where does the feeling come from, unique to mankind, that we are not well, and what is it that we desire to be cured of? Is cure possible? If cure entails making our peace with the way things are, is it necessarily a good thing to be cured?

To Svevo, Schopenhauer was the first philosopher to treat those afflicted with the disease of reflective thought as a species of their own, coexisting warily with the healthy, unreflective types who in Darwinian jargon might be called the fit. With Darwin— Darwin read through a Schopenhauerian lens—Svevo carried on a dogged lifelong tussle. His first novel was to have carried a Darwinian allusion in its title: Un inetto, the inept or ill-adapted one. But his publisher objected, and he settled for the rather colorless Una vita. In exemplary naturalistic fashion, the book follows the history of a young bank clerk who, when at last he has to face the fact that he is vacant of all drive, desire, or ambition, does the correct evolutionary thing and commits suicide."

Italo Svevo: Zeno's Conscience

Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience (The Confessions of Zeno in an earlier translation) is considered a modernist masterpiece in the same tradition as Joyce, Proust and others. (Indeed it was Joyce who helped Svevo find a publisher and audience in France.) Though so far, and I have read around 200 pages, less than half, it reads more like Woody Allen than Proust or Joyce. It is rip-roaringly funny and very entertaining. Sentences like, "I looked at the Stars as if I had just conquered them," are littered on every page. The introductory chapter in which the narrator tells the story of his nicotine-addiction is a small classic in itself. Even better is the chapter where he recounts the story of his disastrous courtship, unrequited love and an ill-advised marriage. All really funny.

Beneath all the farcical comedy, however, there are of course lots of serious things too. In common with the standard works of European modernism it takes a critical look at human consciousness too, how it can become a prison, how the process of thought itself results in self-alienation and how self-awareness is often a "crippling burden" inhibiting meaningful action and how close in general it is to rationalisation and self-delusion. This is definitely not a very uplifting subject for a book. Indeed reading Proust's novel or The Man Without Qualities can be really gloomy experiences, even though they are very funny at places, specially Musil. Unlike those books here the mood is very light overall even though the ultimate "message" is somewhat dark. Will write in more detail about it once I have finished it. It is quite long, almost 500 pages! More than half is still left.