PAR TIS
AN
REV lEW
suspects
him
of acting in earnest instead of faking, Perro replies coldly:
"This country of ours is half unripe and half ripe. It is you that has to
give one name or another to this stage. To true crimes you give the
name of revolution, to the false that of dictatorship."
Sarcasms of this sort do not only refer to Fascism 'but to contem–
porary politics in general. Politics, in the rough, simple, and perspica–
cious manner in which Moravia sees it, boils down to the clear and ag–
gressive attitude, that in the abstractions of politics, individuals-already
so incapable of clarity and so weak in ordinary life--cannot but appear
openly as what they are: puppets of fate. In the end those who manage
are the ingenuous and the natural : Saverio the terrorist on one side, and
on the other the beautiful Fausta: both play with fire without realizing
the danger. The dictator Tereso sums up concisely the dialectic of
events: "Instead of a wedding, there will 'be a funeral, that's all."
La
Mascherata
is a play that is directly descended from Machiavelli's
Man–
dragola,
because of the unbelieving and lucid spirit which animates it,
and above all because of the dry and cruel way of treating the charac–
ters. Machiavellian, however, at one remove, for Moravia's sarcasm in–
cludes Machiavellianism.
In
Beatrice Cenci,
written in 1957, Moravia has written a tragedy
of Machiavellianism. In fact, his attitude toward Machiavellianism is
the basic motivation of his art. It is understandable that having become
a mature novelist, he would have wanted to push this theme into the
clarity characteristic of the drama.
Moravia's work is an illuminating example of the relation between
narrative and dramaatic art, between the impulse to narrate and the
impulse to dramatize. Very distant from drama because of its pervasive
feeling of the opacity of the world and the ambiguity of every human
attitude, nevertheless his art also aspires to the nakedness of dramatic
conflict as the solution of his most pressing torment, which is to redis–
cover necessity in a world in which everything seems to happen by
chance or weakness or from a general lack of conviction. From
Gli In–
differenti
to
La Mascherata,
to
The Conformist
to the
Roman Stories,
it would be easy to mark the stages of this search for necessity. It
is
a search for something so fixed and adamant in individuals and the
world, that it can finally allow us- beyond the ambiguities of chance
and intrigue--to conceive of clear-cut conflicts, decisive clashes, reso–
lute actions. It is the possibility, in short, of finding just what is lacking
in the world of Moravia.
Had Moravia wanted to do a play by current standards he had
only to dramatize one of his plots, for the art of dialog
is
one of
his
