B0 0 KS
429
cility, intellectuality, and gift for symbolic situation that make him, on a
small scale to be sure, one of the few writers who can, without too much
faking, use many of Joyce's innovations. The book is filled with stunning
moments, notably an excellent, satirical, pseudo-Marxist interpretation of
Hamlet
in which Fortinbras is the hero.
It is pleasing to have a sophisticated work of literature
in
which the
serious writer, naturally unable to forget the haunting existence of Joyce,
Proust, Kafka, Surrealism, and modern poetry, isn't in his creative work
the palsied victim of his own necessary knowledge.
Italo Svevo's
The
Confessio~s
of .(eno,
happily reprinted by New
Directions, is a reckless, spontaneous work, best described by Zeno's
own words when he says he is in a "mood for improvisation." It goes,
as a confession or diary should, right to the self and whips along
like an inspired monologue. This book, written in 1923 by Ettore Schmitz
under the pseudonym of Svevo, is a wonderful and profound comedy
about a feverish, narcissistic, little neurotic, Zeno, who alternates be–
tween spasms of uncontrollable buffoonery and hopeless self-torment.
Zeno's life, in the absence of any mysterious events, is really quite dull,
a situation that seems more faithful to the neurotic pattern than are the
extraordinary adventures usually found in psychoanalytic fiction. Zeno
is lazy and bored; he suffers from hypochondria; he devotes himself
to such purposes as giving up cigarettes in order, by this process of self- _
discipline, merely to pass the time.
The confessions are supposedly written under the advice of a psycho–
analyst, but they do not turn out to be a clear, simple case history. Zeno
is real because
everything
is wrong with him and, at the same time, he
suffers from nothing. He has a romantic nature but cannot fall in love;
he has nothing to do, being rich and incompetent, and yet he is always
busy, either trying to win a wife he doesn't want or seducing a mistress
who doesn't satisfy him or going into business for which he has no
aptitude. And, as an intelligent neurotic, the extremity of Zeno's interest
in
himself forces upon him an interest in everyone else. This interest is
not '!truistic; it is the cynical, observant eye necessary to a man bent
upon his own salvation.
Zeno, as the introduction by Renata Poggioli indicates, is a perfect
product of bourgeois life; he has plenty of time for himself and enough
education to be fascinated by his own ambiguities; in addition nothing
he does is completely disastrous because he has the true bourgeois safety,
which means that
if
he makes a fool of himself no one will think the
worse of him for it. In fact this slippery character is looked upon as a
model husband, which he may very well be since his passions are con–
stantly checked by neurotic weariness.
Zeno's life is
a.
chain of wrong guesses. He goes into a respectable
