BOOKS
MORAVIA AND THE WORM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
THE EMPTY CANVAS. (LA NOlA)
By
Alberto Moroyio. Forror, S+rous
ond Cudohy. $4.50.
Let us hear what Moravia says in
La Noia
about boredom–
that fundamental, ineradicable condition of all his work, which he treats
explicitly for the first time in this last novel:
"For me...boredom is not the opposite of entertainment. On the
contrary, I might even say that it resembles it in some respects, since
it too produces distraction and forgetfulness, though of a particular
kind. Boredom, for me, is really a sort of insufficiency or scantiness of
reality. To use a metaphor, reality, when I am bored, has always had
on me the disconcerting effect of too short a blanket on a winter night:
pull it over one's feet and one's chest gets cold pull it over one's chest
and one's feet get cold; and so it is impossible ever to really fall asleep.
Yet again, my boredom could
be
defined as a disease of objects con–
sisting of a sudden withering or loss of vitality, as though I were seeing a
flower bud, wilt and tum to dust all within a few minutes. The principal
aspect of boredom was a practical matter: while it was impossible to
remain in my own company, I was the one person I could not possibly
be rid of."
This is the mood that Moravia called indifference in his first
novel. But indifference was concerned not with reality in general but
with other people. It was a young man's incapacity to share the feel–
ings, passions and desires that seem to give other people reasons for
action that are, if not valid, at least clear and direct.
It
was accompanied
by a great sadness and a sense of guilt the more depressing in that it
had no ascertainable basis. One might say that the boredom felt by the
protagonist
of La N oia
is indifference extended to everything real, to
objects taken singly and together, from the most vexatious object of
all: oneself, to the object that is most abstract and omnipresent: the
world, in which things and creatures should be intelligible but instead
only mirror, in an endless multiplication, a senselessness that is always
the same.
We have said "mood." Moravia's boredom, on the contrary, is an
inner condition that is both without a cause and chronic, that not only
undermines the very possibility of experiencing different or changeable
moods but infects the external world, rendering it uninhabitable and
inadequate, not by reason of this or that deficiency but taken as a
whole and, almost, without repeal.
At this point we pass from psychology as a physical manifestation
to "metaphysics": to a zone, that is, where, for the observation and
description of so-called facts is substituted the single haunting question
of the relation, the seemingly unbridgeable gap, between the individual
