Alberto Moravia Enthusiasm

Long-ish essay on the great Italian novelist Alberto Moravia (link via bookforum)

It was against this widespread alienation or male di vivere (evil of living) that poet and Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) had also asserted himself, through negativity, as a force of resistance. The humanism of Montale was found in his responses to contingencies that paradoxically arose to illuminate his life and relationships. Moravia too sets out from a radical negativity, but in the domain of prose. This much he has in common with Montale: a stoical and metaphysical curiosity about the nature of existence and the dark conviction that, while only love can repair the brokenness of the world, in actuality this love is more often negated than fulfilled.

Moravia's novel Contempt is a huge personal favourite. I had written about it and his other novella Conjugal Love here and here.

Alberto Moravia: Conjugal Love

Alberto Moravia's Conjugal Love suffers a little in comparison to his Contempt which essentially tackles the same subject at a somewhat greater length and in more detail. This is not to say that this book is any bad, indeed from every possible standard it is quite accomplished. Like Contempt it is narrated by a young struggling writer who is trying to understand the nature of love and marriage and also trying hard to come to terms with his own self-worth as a writer. Like Contempt, its central subject is the disease of hyper self-consciousness too - hyper-rationalistic and analytic way of looking at everything, the mania for understanding every nuance of a feeling, to discover the meaning of every gesture, looking at everything as if everything were a sign and then despairing over one's failure to do so or finding emptiness where one suspected there must be something.

The basic story of the novel is the stuff of farce. The narrator whisks off himself with his wife to a villa in Tuscany thinking that isolation will perhaps inspire him to write the masterpiece that is inside him. But when no such inspiration comes over him, he suspects the reason might be the way he has been dissipating his energies in the carnal affairs. He decides to abstain from sex and soon enough his creative juices start flowing or at least that's what he feels initially. Things get more complicated because of the presence of a libertine and portly barber (yes, a barber) in the house.

Although the basic plot summary sounds funny, the book is quite sombre and melancholy in tone. The narrator longs for a life driven by instinct, full of spontaneity and passion, a life in which actions and gestures are driven by genuine feelings and not by conscious calculation. These are the traits which attracts him to his wife and it is this fundamental difference in the ways of looking at the world, (which I suspect Moravia thinks is representative of the two genders) that makes the analysis of this "conjugal love" so much interesting. The book is actually quite funny too, in its own dry and pedantic way. The way he obsesses about every detail of his own feelings, his rationalizations, the maniacal analysis of ordinary situations making them more complex than they actually are, all again in the service of self-denials and rationalizations - these are all funny to read but in the end a bit discomforting too (specially if you share his sensibilities and proclivities).

A review with links to other reviews here. Earlier post on Contempt here.

Alberto Moravia: Contempt

Along with The Man Without Qualities and Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience, Contempt is the best novel I have read all this year so far. Like the other two this also deserves a place in the standard canon of European modernist literature (or at least deserves more mainstream success). It may not be as inventive as Joyce, Kafka or Woolf but like the other two it has profound and important things to say about how the modern world works and also about what has changed and what has been lost, perhaps forever.

It also shares some of the style of the other two. There is not much of a plot and very few events happen over the course of the story. The concern is not to tell a story but to take a situation and explore and analyse it from all possible angles. Instead of action or drama what we get is a series of essays about emotional states of the main character(s). (Musil even explicitly calls this style "essayism" in his book.)

I am finding it difficult to describe the book. It is basically narrated by a struggling screenwriter who is trying to understand why his wife suddenly became so indifferent to him, even came to despise him and feel "contempt" for him, and how their relationship broke down all of a sudden. In the course of his self-introspection we learn that the trouble started when he accepted a screenwriting job for a popular film producer. He was man of artistic ideals and wanted to do something in the theatre but to please his wife he bought an apartment and to pay off the loan he is now forced to accept this job even if it means serious compromise with his artistic principles. He only agonizes over this decision because his wife never tells him why she suddenly doesn't love him any more. He tries to think of different situations and how she could have interpreted what happened. One time he allowed the producer to take his wife in his car and while he himself took another car. So he thinks perhaps she thinks that he is prostituting her to gain favours from the rich and powerful man. We never learn if it is indeed this that is in wife's mind but it shows narrator's own self-hatred and "contempt" that he feels for himself that is perhaps reflected in his relationship with his wife. Much of the book is an analysis of this melancholy, the way he grieves over the love which is now dead, all written in the most rational and understated prose, which only serves to heighten the effect in the end.

There is also an absolutely brilliant sub-plot. The film producer's next project is a film adaptation of the Odyssey and obviously he wants to make it a film of spectacle. He asks the narrator to write the screenplay with the German director Rheingold who will eventually direct the adaptation. Now this German director isn't interested in spectacle at all. He is of course a German so unlike the sunny Italians, he is more interested in the darker interior terrain of human consciousness than in the external world of seas and mountains that constitute much of Homer's world. He says Odyssey is actually about "conjugal repugnance" and provides psychoanalytic interpretations of Ulysses' actions. He says unlike in the ancient world we can't take Ulysses' intentions at the face value. Molteni protests at this interpretation but only because he sees that this new interpretation reflects his own predicament and his own relationship with his wife. He longs for the original Odyssey but he knows that it is impossible...

And Homer had wished to represent a sea just like this, beneath a similar sky, along a similar coast, with characters that resembled this landscape and had about them an ancient simplicity, its agreeable moderation. Everything was here, and there was nothing else. And now Rheingold wanting to make this bright and luminous world, enlivened by the winds, glowing with sunshine, populated by quick-witted, lively beings, into a kind of dark, visceral recess, bereft of colour and form, sunless, airless: the subconscious mind of Ulysses. And so the Odyssey was no longer that marvelous adventure, the discovery of the Mediterranean, in humanity's fantastic infancy, but had become the interior drama of a modern man entangled in the contradictions of a psychosis.

He even says that what Rheingold is trying to do has already been done by Joyce. Joyce turned those great heroes into alienated, morose and neurotic losers.

"Well," I continued passionately, "Joyce also interpreted the Odyssey in the modern manner...and he went much father than you do, my dear Rheingold, in the job of modernization--that is of debasement, of degradation, of profanation. He made Ulysses a cuckold, an Onanist, an idler, a capricious, incompetent creature...and Penelope a retired whore. Aeolus became a newspaper editor, the descent into the infernal regions the funeral of boon-companion, Circe a visit to the brothel, and the return to Ithaca the return home at dead of the night through the streets of Dublin, with a stop or two on the way to piss in the dark corner. But at least Joyce had the discernment not to bring in the Mediterranean, the sea, the sun, the sky, the unexplored lands of antiquity. He placed the whole story in the muddy streets of a northern city, in taverns and brothels, in bedrooms and lavatories. No sunshine, no sea, no sky...everything modern, in other words debased, degraded, reduced to our own miserable stature."

Godard's film adaptation is much more aggressive on the theme of commercialism of the modern world. The book is far more subtle but even then the reader can't miss it. At the end it is clear that it is mainly the financial, commercial structures of the modern world which imprison human beings and make it impossible for him to live in harmony with his own nature, producing alienation and neurosis in the process, resulting in breakdown of relationships and contributing to general unhappiness.

Will probably write about Godard's film too sometime. Meanwhile the book goes highly recommended from my side. Absolutely essential reading...

Alberto Moravia

I think the name of Italian novelist Alberto Moravia is more familiar to film-buffs rather than fiction readers. Two of the finest European art films from the sixties (or at least two of the finest European art films in colour), Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist were based on his novels. I spent most of the day today reading his slender masterpiece of a novel Contempt. It is really very impressive. I am still not done yet. Will probably write in detail when I am finished. Watching the film I always thought Godard invented most of the stuff on his own but now after having read the book the film seems to be a very faithful adaptation. There is even a character of the German director who is said to have made "colossal films" in pre-Hitler Germany but then the narrator adds his caveat that he was "nowhere in the league of Pabsts and Langs." (In the film Fritz Lang plays himself i.e. character of the German director!).

I will probably write more about it when I am done reading. For now I found an interesting essay on his works, specially this provocative comment:

"More important, Moravia's novels offer a bracing counterpoint to today's soft-hearted and -headed fiction. Moravia sees fiction as a form of knowledge: his aesthetic suggests a creative cross between a doctor and a mechanic, with the abstractness of a metaphysician tossed in. Moravia's suave pitilessness—his self-conscious variation on the mercilessness ofMaupassant—runs counter to contemporary preferences for feeling rather than thinking, and to the associated belief that the imagination should primarily serve as an instrument of sympathy rather than scrutiny. The neglect of Moravia has as much to do with the peculiar philosophical strengths of his withdrawn perspective—particularly its fascination with the growing similarities between the human and the mechanistic—as with the usual vagaries of fashion, though they are crucial.

Moravia's mercilessness challenges the current Anglo-American rage for a more empathic, emotional brand of narrative. Chekhov's short stories are now fashionable among American writers. (James Wood, Elizabeth Hardwick, Richard Ford, and Cynthia Ozick have all penned recent appreciations.) In part, this enthusiasm is based on Chekhov's wryly sympathetic observation of the unpredictability of life. For British critic V. S. Pritchett, Chekhov saw human existence as "breaking and running like a chain of raindrops upon the window. Now the drops run and pool together, presently they part, slide off on their own and momentarily catch the light in some new, fragile and vanishing pattern." Contemporary American taste runs to fiction whose patterns attempt to capture the fleeting perceptions of spontaneity, the effervescent signs of human freedom.

In contrast, Moravia's fiction mistrusts pattern, no matter how transient. The mind internalizes the perceptual expectations and habits of an increasingly commercialized and mechanized society. Moravia's plots and characters are ambivalent about repetition; half-heartedly, they treasure the pleasures of the familiar, the joys of routine. Moravia uses sensuality to explore the individual's response to the leveling political and technological pressures of modernity: sex offers a convenient intersection of nature and automation, instinct and habit, the public and private, fetish and freedom. Thus the most striking aspect of Moravia's fiction isn't its once-daring sexual focus but the cool calculated way it looks at love—or the lack of it—in the modern world."